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nihilii

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Everything posted by nihilii

  1. That makes 3 of us, heh. Mine has been 50 for a while. No great native answer to the AV problem, but I chug luck insps so it doesn't bother me. It is great fun being able to spam savage attacks and nothing but savage attacks, with the confusion auras making enough of a mess most of the time. Sometimes it feels as if World of Confusion is almost redundant. I've turned it off for a while because the GFX gets overbearing, and AA by itself seems like it confuses bosses often enough. But maybe I don't pay enough attention. I like /psi for the convenience of Indomatible Will, anyway. Going AFK and not worrying about keeping up perma Dom.
  2. Has anyone ever had that happen? I logged out my level 34 villain Scrapper in Nerva yesterday, at the door of a newspaper mission. Today I find him at the sub near Lord MayhemMission in the north of Port Oakes. Nobody else has my account, nor would they have any reason to randomly go to that spot in Port Oakes. Nothing else is changed about the character.
  3. Going to second both the good choice of AT for the purpose at hand, and Water/SR or Water/Inv for a fun primary with a solid low maintenance secondary. The Sentinel version of SR is greatly improved, with passive mez protection built into the toggles - pick Master Brawler rather than Practiced Brawler. Master Brawler also doubles as an absorb shield, essentially giving SR the "heal" it always needed. Sentinel SR also gets a Quick Recovery clone, so you're set on end too.
  4. Black Swan uses Oppressive Gloom frequently, damaging herself in the process.
  5. EU player on US servers. There is a slight latency difference, but it's essentially impossible to see outside of a controlled test where you hop on the EU server, attack a few things, then immediately jump on an US server and attack a few more things. CoH is pretty lenient on latency due to its design. Anything under 300ms and you're golden. If you want to check the numbers you get on either server, /netgraph 1 will give you some stats.
  6. Missing is explicitely meant as something bad. Knockback is supposed to be a boon.
  7. /energy is really nice now and capable of serious damage, if you're willing to go into melee. Total Focus, Power Burst and Sniper Blast are all extreme level damage powers (Power Burst gets boosted by Total Focus), throw in Dominate in between and you can make a fantastic attack chain out of that (Dom TF Dom PB SB). /elec is uhh. Relatively fast animations? That's about the best I can muster for it. Doesn't even have a proper PBAoE, just a cone and the AoE part of Thunder Strike. Which itself deals meh damage for its animation time. I suppose cones aren't so bad for Mind given that Terrify is also one, but with either secondary you're going to have to go in melee anyway, and the range and arc of Static Discharge are just pathetic compared to standard 15 feet radius dominator PBAoEs. IMHO, /energy is the clear winner here.
  8. Perhaps you're aware of that and I'm misreading your wording, but just in case and for lurkers as much as anyone else: AVs as a whole don't have innate resistance to -res as part of their general AV protection against most debuffs. Some AVs have some level of resistance to some damage types, and resistance resists -res.
  9. Just about every powerset has received enough direct and indirect buffs since Live. To roll a gimped combination almost requires dedicated effort. For Blasters what would this look like? Almost every primary is good. AR might be at the bottom. And as for secondaries, they're all pretty awesome now... But maybe you can tie AR/ with /Fire, to combine a low damage primary that wants cone range with a high damage primary that wants melee and PBAoE range. This AR/Fire would still be a powerful character perfectly capable of soloing all solo content and then some, mind you. It wouldn't perform nearly as well as most other combos. And yet even if you pitted it against, say, a Fire/Elec, which is one of the most powerful combos... The AR/Fire played by a good player would outperform the Fire/Elec played by an average player.
  10. There is irony in that argument to me, because I think most of us who are on the "Tankers were overbuffed" side argue this first and foremost based on a practical experience, namely that Tankers are basically indestructible and pay a very small damage tax for that. The Pylon tests and controlled missions and whatnot come afterwards, as a test to see whether that initial perspective is grounded. Numbers are pointed out not because they're the start of the argument - but because they're necessary. Bringing up something being too strong will always trigger visceral reactions from people who don't want their beloved toons to be touched (understandably so). Caring about balance is a "damned if you, damned if you don't" thing. Point out you see something off, you get told it's just you. Try to test it in some controlled way to prove or disprove your observations, and if it turns out the tests seem to prove your observations, people will figure out reasons to dismiss the testing as invalid. It took months if not years of numbercrunching for people to finally accept TW was overpowered in its previous incarnation. Even though the overpoweredness was plainly visible to anyone who logged ingame and made an earnest effort to abuse the set, no number crunching required. Nobody has been foolhardy enough to suggest there is an exact ratio of damage:mitigation that must be respected. Figuring out such an equation would be a monumental task to start with. At the end of the day I think many (?) recognize the damage:mitigation ratio favors Tankers over Brutes, the main point of contention being whether that extra survivability translates to something meaningful in practice.
  11. A primary like SS or Stone where you can stick FF in just about everything to keep a constant +100% +20% recharge from Lightning Reflexes +70% from Hasten +95% in Power Surge (probably want to avoid a recharge alpha, to keep proc rates up) leaving you 115% recharge to find in set bonuses, which implies dedicating your build to it but not impossible You could also get Ageless to round it up. It would be relatively inefficient as an overall build, but that should get you as close to perma Surge as you can. Edit: here's my attempt on Stone/Elec. It has Power Surge on a 22.5s cooldown if the FF proc goes off consistently, 73.9s cooldown if no proc ever went off. FF is in most attacks, also including lolBoulder rather than Gloom to get more FF chances still. You can basically chain the two mallets and Hurl Boulder, and replace Hurl Boulder with Tremor, Seismic Smash and Fault at will. It has 100% slow resistance, so recharge debuffs don't screw us over. Feels surprisingly playable on paper.
  12. I feel a case can be made SR and Shield scrappers can outsurvive Fire and Elec tankers. At least in a no insp world. Defense + DDR really does wonders. I agree with your overall point nonetheless. Just felt like nitpicking this one. In the great can of worms that is balance, it's probably likely (a) Tankers were overbuffed and (b) Defense has been too good as a mechanic for a long long time. (b) superseding (a) in some cases doesn't tell us much about (a) itself.
  13. It would be great if Blaze and Fireball were combined into one power dealing the damage of Blaze with the AoE of Fireball. Call it Blazeball, and give it to every blaster at level 1.
  14. Mind blown. Thanks!! Would you believe it, I've ran DP for months convinced I was applying a -RES debuff while in incendiary ammo, without ever doublechecking it actually did. 😄 In my defense, this is on a Cold defender with so much -RES debuffs it's hard to keep track of what's what, but... yeah. Reading power descriptions helps.
  15. Ageless doesn't affect proc rates, which in a way makes it even more useful for any build leveraging procs. Worth noting /rad has tons of endurance management by default, and EM/ is the most efficient powerset on DPE (because ET costs 0 end). It doesn't necessarily show up easily on Mids - Gamma Boost gives you increasing recovery as health goes down, and Particle Shielding also has an unenhanceable +50% recovery. That is to say, your current build is likely overkill for endurance management, especially with mostly full sets in attacks (ergo good local endurance reduction) and several Unbreakable Guard bonuses. I bet you couldn't run yourself dry even before using Ageless. So that could allow you to get Barrier to stack at least 5% def/res on what you have, and possibly save some slots chasing +res here and there; or you could keep Ageless and save a bunch of slots dedicated to end, essentially the perf shifter procs, miracle, numina, end mod in stamina. With these slots you could flesh out Particle Shielding (it can make good use of a full Preventive set, the proc is always good on any character). Or you could add these slots to Moonbeam. Other option, given that ET doesn't use end and recharges so fast, and Moonbeam does use end and can use extra recharge without hurting proc rate, you could swap the last 2 Heca slots from ET to Moonbeam, keeping mostly the same set bonuses (trading 10% accuracy for 4% damage, that's a plus, you have tons of accuracy as is). Yet another option could be to slot full Apoc in MB, keep Heca proc, dam, dam/end in ET, and use the remaining 3 ET slots for 3 damage procs.
  16. The most obvious bang-for-your-buck change I see is that you could drop Total Focus (mostly pointless with just the base slot) and replace it with Hasten. Faster cooldowns means more healing, more buffing, more debuffs, more goodness. As a rule, I wouldn't chase healing set bonuses, which are comparatively small. Likewise with slotting attacks for debuff, defense debuff just isn't so useful. Piercing Rounds is a great attack if you want to debuff, it applies -20% res to its target.
  17. Damage-per-Animation is generally the best metric. Then there are misc considerations like building a full attack chain out of them, damage-per-endurance efficiency, eventual preference for ranged over melee. For Psi/, the bread-and-butter ST attacks are TK Blast and Psi Lance. In /Mental, Mind Probe and TK Thrust are great picks. Psychic Shockwave is a great AoE. Every other AoE in either Psi/ or /Mental, is, uhh... "Uhh". But you'll likely want at least one extra to round up your AoE output, maybe Psionic Tornado for ease of use as its 20' radius is meaty if nothing else. (Also take Psychic Wail, which I don't count as "AoE" because it's a nuke. Nukes are always great.)
  18. I was surprised to see that as well. We don't get a good feel for his sheer strength in the usual environment of a 12+ people overbuffed league, but this version of Siege smacks you with 1000+ damage hits on seemingly every attack. Even without the red rings of doom, surviving alone would prove challenging for most characters.
  19. I slot the proc, along with 5 damage procs, in the single target hold. You get double stacks fairly easily with that setup, which is equivalent to an extra level 50 IO of damage beyond the enhancement diversification limits, or like a free tier4 Musculature Alpha slot. I put the remaining 5 pieces in an AoE mez.
  20. I love my fire/ninja. It's probably my highest damaging character when it comes to ST damage. DreadShinobi listed most of the salient points. It's also worth noting you can slot an Achilles' Heel directly in Sting of the Wasp, so you get access to both -RES procs natively. The damage output of Blaze Sting Golden Blaze Sting Blazing Bolt is enormous (700+ DPS). Note, this is building for damage with maximum procs and giving no damn about defenses. The standard approach of chasing defense set bonuses and slotting full sets probably doesn't work as well for /ninja as it does for many other secondaries, because /ninja gets so many proc options and so much out of procs. Finally, there is something I expect to get fixed eventually but that is nice in the meantime: the endurance cost of katana attacks was not bumped when they doubled their recharge and increased their damage accordingly. You are getting very, very good DPE on Sting and GD. Well... For starters, you forgot to pick Fire/* for your Elec/Ninja. 🙂 There is Fire Blasters and then there is everyone else. Fire Blast is broken on any AT that isn't Sentinels. I suspect you'd find your Elec/Ninja closer to an Elec/Atomic or Elec/Elec, if you built them all roughly the same way.
  21. nihilii

    MA vs StJ

    MA is somewhat bound by animation times, and there's no high recharge attack to (ab)use the Critical Strikes proc. Even though the attacks start out great, this limits the ST juice you can squeeze somewhat. You can pick EC and stuff the proc in it. EC is decent but not fantastic, even with no local recharge that's about a 70% chance to proc. Storm Kick and CAK are must haves, Storm Kick for the DPA and CAK for the DPA and -res (Achilles' Heel). Moonbeam is barely better than Cobra Strike/Crane Kick. All MA attack chains seem to roughly end up at the same point. Whether SK CAK SK CS/MB, SK EC SK CAK MB, SK EC SK CAK CS... You deal great sustained DPS, topping in the 500ish range. StJ gets a lot out of high level options. Crushing Uppercut easily makes for 90% chance to proc Critical Strikes, and Moonbeam lets you flesh out your attack chain into CU RC SB MB RC SB, for near guaranteed crits on half of the RCs and SBs, toying with the 600ish DPS range. Those figures assume /bio, but I'm not sure any specificity of /bio would favor StJ more than MA to the point the gap would be closed elsewhere. The near guaranteed crits on RC and SB are what make StJ pull ahead for me. They clear a +4 minion with one hit, making for a satisfying "one-and-done, move to the next one" in situations where stuff is scattered, rather than herd and wait. Opposite to Hjarki's opinion (big shocker, I know), I find StJ more enjoyable than MA in real play thanks to its up-down nature. You have a clear weak part of the attack chain to replace with misc clicks: one of the two RC SB in the second part of the attack chain. BU (Combat Readiness, whatever) also lets you initiate combo level 3 at will even if you take a big break (say you're getting hammered and use tons of defensive clicks). MA has attacks that almost defeat targets in X hits but not quite, less deterministic crits and lots of overkill damage. Against tougher targets there's no clear slow part of the attack chain to use your clicks - somewhat "worse", Storm Kick is your best move and everything that isn't Storm Kick or Moonbeam is a 1.848s animation or above, yet more slight waste with many misc clicks being 1.32s or under. It probably isn't the biggest deal and I'm likely conflating issues of personal feel with everything else here. Dragon's Tail likely makes MA better in overall play anyway.
  22. nihilii

    MA vs StJ

    Scrapper StJ > Scrapper MA for single target damage at high level. MA wins on AoE, but that's largely because StJ AoE is catastrophic. Dragon's Tail isn't anything special either; although it has a nice swift animation time and knockdown effect, so that's fun. Another boon for MA against StJ specifically, it exemplars much better. Storm Kick is your best attack (lvl 1 pick), Cobra Strike and Crane Kick are both strong attacks at lvl 2 and 8, and Crippling Axe Kick comes at lvl 18. Eagle's Claw being optional, you can deal impressive damage output at low level. Whereas StJ really needs Crushing Uppercut to come together, and gets a lot out of Moonbeam/Zapp, making it a character best played at lvl 30 and above. MA might be better overall, but there's a hard ceiling on performance due to lengthy animation times and smoothed out performance all over the set. StJ tends to pull ahead in the late game as it has basically 3 good attacks, so benefits heavily from recharge and epics; once it comes together, StJ has some VERY satisfying mechanics. It's hard to give a clear winner, it will depend on your personal goals. You can't go wrong with either choice.
  23. Alpha: Musculature Destiny: Ageless Interface: Degen Hybrid: Assault Radial (there are arguments showing Assault Core to outperform it, but that is assuming constant attacking to maintain damage stacks, and no external damage buff. I like that Assault Radial is always the same sizeable boon per hit regardless of the situation) Judgement: Vorpal (for ease of aiming, but also because it's a +30% defense buff for 10 seconds) Lore: Banished Pantheon (high damage + -res debuffs)
  24. nihilii

    SS/SR

    Seconding the SR/SS suggestion. Scaling resistances is also nicer on a Tanker, you get the Might of the Tanker proc to round it up too. This particular combo just *wants* to be a Tanker.
  25. Wooow. What an amazing find! It was always somewhat odd to see Lore BP work so well as a force multiplier in level 54 content, compared to Longbow. Pull out 3 Lore BP and watch all 4 AVs melt in the final Tin Mage fight, whereas if you summon 3 Lore Longbow you're in for a much, much longer fight. But surely that must just be their -res debuffs? Yeah, no kidding. Not only we got full damage out of them, but their -res debuffs were in full force as well. Essentially giving you a pocket scrapper AND defender all in one. In retrospect this seems so obvious. Things are easy to miss when we don't really want to see them...
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