nihilii

Oh man. Imagine being that one guy who's already upset about the /enterfrombasepasscode change and has yet to realise his retirement fund was gobbled up.

EM/bio scrapper. Fire/ninja blaster. Decisions, decisions. Maybe both at once!!

Values are open to debate. Anyone who believes in dogma is inherently religious. Whether said person worships magical sky people, or loudly claims there is no deity. Religious sentiment isn't necessarily tied to gods, any system of faith may qualify as a religion.

Let's keep religion out of the game, please. Your original suggestion wasn't bad as such, but now you're doing a good job campaigning against it.

I don't fully understand the testing methodology. You're using just Tanker primaries, no secondary, so the only damage the player does is through things like damage auras, Burn and so on. Correct? I'm not surprised to see your results with Bio. It is what it is. Much like Rage, stances are super powerful at high level, but arguably even more powerful at low level, where the relative performance is that much bigger.

Nitpick largely irrelevant to the topic at hand: on Tankers at least, going for BF -> AV gives you better DPS than BF -> AS -> SS -> AS, provided you go without local recharge. DB attacks being fast recharge low damage to start with, the lenient requirements of BF -> AV really make that proc rate shoot up.

Pick one of two: 1) It is most definitely not the same thing, and I think even you are aware of that, hence words like "kind of". X + any != X + Y. 2) If it is the same thing, then there's no reason to tie conditions to specific powers. Open up the special effects to every power to the point it's as generic as debuff + attack. For people who believe it is the same thing, nothing changes. And for people who don't and are upset about the changes, they won't get to complain anymore. Win/win. Basically, any argument CoH combos/conditionals don't differ from regular power design is self-defeating if you're actually pro combos, because it's essentially arguing for a solution that offers no subjective benefit to the speaker yet upsets another part of the population. Whether that other part of the population is misguided or not doesn't matter. The moment you posit combos/conditionals are "irrelevant", you've got one group where the two solutions are good and one group where only one of the two solutions is good. Common sense and empathy dictate you pick the solution that is good for everyone. (Less tongue in cheek? Let's put to rest that silly pretense combos don't matter. Some people like them, some people don't like them. Some people may be lucky enough that their own particular playstyle means there's no difference and genuinely may not understand there is a difference, but I suspect it would take a very self-centered person to be active on the forums and yet ignore all the evidence of other people feeling differently.)

Be as it may, some people prefer to have full free reign over their attack chain. It's not useful to insist the difference is meaningless when it clearly matters to a part of the population. I feel we all know what "gimmick" entails within this context. An attack having higher numbers one way or another is not a gimmick. A 1-2 combo where special effect 2 only happens if 1 happened first, and 2 cannot be replaced by 3, ... is a gimmick. Using a debuff before using an attack is not a gimmick. "conditional" as C_P says is a good way to put it too. People unhappy about the introduction of conditional mechanics on their beloved sets are likely to use more pejorative words. Being pedantic won't convince anyone who isn't already on board.

*/regen/soul is basically your click heavy defense set. Alternate Shadow Meld and Moment of Glory for permanent softcap and beyond (and ridiculously low DPS, as your animation time gets swallowed up).

To be fair, the Eagle's Claw change was reverted... which is ironic as this was the one change that was actually a massive buff. But I like to give the devs credit, so I'm guessing they saw the EC change wasn't liked by concept/casual players AND was too powerful in the hands of minmaxers, hence the revert. Still... It would have been nice to have MA topping the DPS charts for once.

I feel your pain, made the same mistake. Intuitively you'd assume it'd fill up empty slots, not overtake what is already slotted.

Bionic_Flea may not be the hero we deserve, but he is the hero we need.

As I understand it, resistance resist resistance debuffs, so you should see a drop of 5 * (1 - 0.9) = 0.5% which would make you go from 95% to 94.5%, so in practice you'd still be at 90% resists. But I could be wrong.

There's a customisation option for pretty much everything in the interface if you look hard enough. I'm sharing my playtime between a desktop at 1680x1050 and a laptop at 1280x800. My windows get jumbled up from these resolution changes. I have been manually dragging every single window on every single character back and forth - until I realised just a few days ago there was an option to save window placement locally.

At a glance, I would guess Mids counts your Might of the Tanker ATO as proccing.

Pretty much 99% of my leveling is done through farming these days, and even AFK farming at that. Yet for the life of me I can't understand the arguments self-professed powerlevelers put forward. "If people like powerleveling then it's good for the game"... Hmm. You can like something at a given moment without that thing being good in the long run. There's an easy real world parallel: drugs. Whether performance enhancing drugs, or mind-altering one. Feels nice in the moment, but abuse it and you risk breaking your body years down the line, or burning down your pleasure receptors, or what have you. Or heck, let's compare farming to... farming. In real life you can have your backyard garden with a few square meters of potatoes and tomatoes growing happily (leveling normally in CoH). Or you can have giant monocultures of avocados spanning kilometers, draining water, ruining the ecosystem and hurting the entire planet (PLing). The basic gameplay loop of games like City of Heroes, video game action RPGs that is, is you get experience points -> you level up -> you win higher stats or new abilities -> you get xp -> you lvl up -> ... and so on. The faster you spin the wheel, the sooner you exhaust all possible rewards. The existence of people who stay engaged with the game despite farming (like me!) doesn't mean everyone is like that. It's a pretty egocentrical perspective. Forums are biaised with people who still enjoy the game. Players who left are not here to say why they left. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you're the nicest guy ever outside of your farming. The CEO of monoculture farms may be giving to charities, the professional athlete jacked with steroids could be meeting with impoverished children; these are drops in the water, compared to the overall momentum their main bad behavior encourages. We're social critters, our actions don't happen in a vacuum. Monkey sees 5-6 rad/fire brutes in Atlas Park AE, monkey makes his own rad/fire farm brute. Thankfully, in CoH the most important consequences are limited to player boredom and lessened availability for teaming. But these consequences exist and pretending they don't seems strange.

I started during the European beta which was middle of I3 iirc, and I want to say it was there.

I'm sad to lose cone Eagle's Claw, it made MA a truly top tier set. But it's undeniable people had good arguments against it too.

Elec/Bio is IMHO the "this can only be on Sentinels". I'm not talking about sheer power, although that build has it in spades as a result of what I'm actually talking about. From the Elec side, you get a proper T3 blast and your no-damage hold turned into a proper T4 blast. Coupled with Voltaic Sentinel, it suddenly makes your single target damage competitive with Fire Blast. Thunderous Blast is originally the slowest recharging nuke in the game. Probably, the devs saw it fit to balance the ability to use it at range, and its massive endurance drain. On Sentinels, TB gets the standard base recharge of 90 seconds while keeping range and massive end drain. On a highend build you're opening every fight with that nuke, and you're sapping all your enemies to 0 or close to it. This all makes for an unique Elec Blast experience. Where other versions are filled with complaints about end drain being useless and damage being too low, Sentinel Elec Blast fixes all these aspects. Now for /bio. Offensive Adaptation + Athletic Regulation + Genomic Evolution. That's it. We're not talking about damage, nor survivability, nor anything we tend to name in these discussions. However, those three powers together give you something unique: massive unsuppressed movement speed. As in, "pretty close to the speed cap with just Sprint" fast. Not necessarily the best combo (although probably up there). But when it comes to unique aspects you won't get somewhere else, look no more.

I think this is the build I copied: I put Heca proc, dam, dam/end, Critical Strikes in Storm Kick, and kept Touch of Death proc and Gladiatior's Smash. I put Arma proc, dam, dam/end, Eradication, Obliteration and Fury -res in Eagle's Claw. I stuffed Dragon's Tail with an Obliteration set (it wasn't well thought out, I just did all these changes in the two minutes after logging in).

I PLed, IOed out and incarnated a fire/fire blaster last month. Once I got to about T3 everything, I noticed I had PLed, IOed out and incarnated a fire/fire blaster one year ago, and stopped roughly at the same point. To add insult to injury, the build I made last year seems to outperform the build I made last month. Curse you, past me!

Haha, I hear you! That was my first thought upon reading the patch notes. Although on second thought it doesn't seem optimal, so not worth making a fuzz on the Beta boards. Still, the first thing I did upon logging in was replace half of my IOs in EC with Arma. So it looked like Heca proc, Heca dam, Heca dam/end, Arma proc, Arma dam, Arma dam/end. Mostly useless, and hence utterly necessary. Optimal or not, it is funny to think there will be the odd unicorn running around with that sort of slotting.

I don't mean that I have 30% def or anything (which in itself, would already make 2 hits in a row fairly rare). More like that I may be somewhere in the 42-44% range rather than 45%. It's not a perceptible difference against something like a Pylon, which does low enough damage you're not going to be worried on any scrapper. But it would probably make me significantly weaker in a no insps +4/x8 ITF challenge.

All my builds are basically like that these days. I shoot for 100-110% final accuracy against +3s, which makes them viable against +4s with level shift. It definitely requires more tradeoffs than the old paradigm. which is a plus for me - I love having to think long and hard in Mids, rather than just plop 5-piece or 6-piece sets chasing defense and recharge bonuses and call it a day. But it's not for everyone: I'm not even sure I'm softcapped on this character.

You might be surprised. But just to be thorough, I am leaning heavily on procs everywhere. SK = Heca dam, dam/end, proc, Mako proc, ToD proc, Critical Strikes proc CAK = Mako proc, ToD proc, Lady Grey proc, Achilles Heel proc, 2 dam IOs CS = Mako proc, ToD proc, Glad Strike proc, 2 dam, 1 dam/end EC = Arma proc, Arma dam, Arma dam/end, Fury proc, Eradication proc, Obliteration proc