nihilii

For anyone who wants +7/+8 mobs, I recommend this: - remove your Alpha slot entirely - start an Apex or Tin Mage task force, solo Once you enter a mission, you will be now levelshifted to 46 due to lacking an alpha, and fighting level 54s Go fight the first group with your uberest of uber builds. See how long it takes you. Then please do me a favor, do YOURSELF a favor more than me: don't just come back here and report you love the challenge. Keep going! Fight, say, the first 3 groups in the Apex TF. Or clear the outdoor part in the Tin Mage TF. Then, do get in the Sewers and fight the Rikti Pylons. Or enter the warehouse and trade punches with Director 11. I can't speak for you. But for me, trying this was my vaccine shot against extreme +con suggestions. "But what about teams? Maybe it'd be fine for teams." Remember -RES is decimated by the purple patch. So you're not going to look at the x3, x4, x5 multiplier you might expect even against +4s (functionally +3s due to Alpha). Most likely, you are looking at best at a x2 from solo performance (picture an average of ~250% damage buffing solo, then push it to for example the 500% damage cap through damage buffs, that's x2). Extreme purple patch isn't much fun no matter how you slice it, IMHO.

I don't think this has been done. I think it would be interesting to see. In my own "testing", my Sents outpace my non-Fire Blasters and break even with my Fire Blasters. Quotes because said testing is too haphazard to draw sure conclusions, even for just me specifically. I hope you go on with your project so I can find motivation to be more structured with mine. 🙂

You can do them solo. You don't need to be overleveled, but you should be at least at the default max level of the task force, because (for example) signature task forces will always spawn enemies at the default max level for the Task Force. In layman's terms: in Positron mobs will always be minimum lvl 15. If you start the TF as a level 11, you'll fight +4s all the way. Worse still, even if you level up during the TF you'll be "stuck" (exemplared) as a level 11. Signature Task Forces (Positron, Synapse, Penelope, Citadel...) are fairly easy, they're standard mission with 1 or 2 AVs at the end. You can generally defeat an AV on any character by using a mix of luck inspirations (fill up your tray at a vendor if need be) and Envenomed Daggers (you can buy 300 charges at the Pay2Win vendor in Atlas). Level 50 TFs and newer TFs tend to be harder. Still doable solo, but you'll likely need a minmaxed build.

I, too, miss UniqueDragon.

Tanker - AoEs are much more fun to use thanks to increased radius. Great base survivability + juicy ATOs let you build for max damage. With procs especially you can go surprisingly far. Coupled with no reliance on Fury or any special mechanics, and with the convenience of strong aggro keeping things nice and tight, you end up with a character that is extremely easy to play. Brute - Fury is still a great boon early on. Brutes will still deal more damage than Tankers as a general rule. Won't ever touch Tanker survivability, but many would argue Brute survivability is still enough to handle whatever you'll face.

You may have just ruined Staff for me. Or made it better. Jury is out.

It's not talked about much, but Consume actually does provide 50% end drain resistance for 2 minutes. With a 3 minutes base recharge, this means having just Hasten (or just 2 recharge SOs) make that resistance perma.

Worth considering you also get absorption through Instant Regeneration. I don't recall the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it adds up to significant "hp/s". Second Wind is also a heal, even though it is pretty awful as such.

That's what your double wants you to believe. They were really, really peeved about you not sending them a card for your birthday.

I use OBS, but "easy to use" and "older rig friendly" is not how I'd describe it. A few years in, I still haven't found a way to get clear footage with a 1680x1050 resolution, and performance struggles on an i5. Not for lack of looking for guides or tweaking with the settings either. Closed source and paid for programs tend to be much more limited in their options and output, but many of them allowed for 1 hotkey recording out of the box on that same rig. Would still recommend OBS - because it might work for you, and if it does, why look anywhere else?

Urge to reroll ice/something/caltrops rising... I don't even care about efficiency, I just want to ice storm - caltrops things into nothingness and laugh at the piddly remaining damage.

War Walkers EBs and Battle Maiden in Apex both have special AI rules. They're set to aggressively chase a team member once they spawn. If a team member is outside the battle area (i.e. still in the sewers or at mission entrance, or by the chopper in the second mission), then they might get stuck trying to chase that person and ignore other threats. I think dead bodies can mess with their AI too. That might be why you're experiencing such weird behavior. I could be wrong, but I'd wager blue patch damage is more likely to be tied to Battle Maiden's health checkpoints than blue swords. Beginning of the fight, kill as many blue swords as you want, and if you're not lowering Battle Maiden's life, the blue patch will hit for ~50 unresistable damage per tick. Near the end of the fight, when she's below 25%, it might deal ~170. There seems to be some randomness as well, i.e. you can still get a patch dealing 50 damage per tick by the end of the fight, right after you took a patch dealing 170 damage per tick. Other theory: there's several completely different entities for blue patches. The blue patch you get when she hits you (the only one that exists in her first phase) deals 50 or 90 damage per tick. The blue patches that trigger every few seconds starting in the ambush phase deal 120 or 170 damage per tick. I never bothered to test this conclusively, I just do a lot of solo, duo and multibox Apex. Could be talking out of my ass. Blue patches stack. So if you have 3-4 teammates in melee with you, you're going to have a bad time no matter what. But if you're the sole meleer, it's conceivable for a Tanker to take on BM and survive the early blue patches. Heck, I've found it doable to survive these early patches on Scrappers, even Stalkers and Sentinels. There are even Tanker builds that can take second phase blue patches, at least up to a point.

Sentinels epics are filled with spammable AoE immobilizes if that's your jam.

All Fire IOs, with delicious damage procs? Yes please! I'd kill for a purple super pack, too...

Lurking that thread at the time, I thought the unspoken consensus was... we know this will make Tankers a little bit broken, but the Brute > Tanker perception is so widespread, nothing short of buffing Tankers beyond Brutes will help. Plus, it won't be that much of a disparity. Plus, we really want those new toys to play with. 12-15 feet radius AoEs, yumm. Well at least it was a consensus in my own head.

You'd think that'd be the point of a tank, heh. It's always been dubious to me how the loudest voices in the CoH PvP community never question the supremacy of team Ventrilo (or I guess Discord these days?) unsuppressed movement ranged blast and heal spikes, something that has been true since the introduction of PvP - but have taken offense over the years to just about everything that ever challenged that supremacy. I mean, coming from Quake, Tribes and Starcraft I can kind of get it. From a mechanical point of view, the freedom of movement in CoH makes for much faster paced dynamics, to the point if you enjoy that style you probably would fall asleep in classic, static MMO PvP. It makes sense to defend this style tooth and nails. Still, seems scrubish to yell "OP" whenever a counter surfaces, rather than adapt and overcome. Especially as there's no indication the highspeed unsuppressed blast spikes paradigm is anything but arbitrary emergent design. From Live days, it was obvious if hard to prove most players favored very static MMO fights. We all recall Siren's Call "Fight Clubs". Hardcore PvPers who made the most out of freedom of movement defeated those players with ease, over and over. Again, impossible to prove but I'd wager a silent majority was driven out by the hardcore minority - for lack of accepting the "rules" that majority wished for, stand still and whack on me until either of us drops dead. Then that hardcore minority turned around and argued for rules, rules, rules. But yeah, knowing the egos that come with the territory I'm sure the people involved have rationalisations for banning Taunt. "It's different, because we know better than you what makes the game good. Getting perma Taunted is not a fun experience. Now, highspeed blast spikes, THAT is a fun experience". Irony aside, personally I could actually agree with that statement. But the whole concept of competitive PvP being more about haggling for banning things rather than brainstorming evolutions is such a turnoff. I suppose we can't blame players too much. CoH PvP started as a broken mess with no significant ingame incentives, got little developer attention and what attention it got arguably made things worse. Got to work with what you've got, and it seems there's at least enough people who enjoy this player made balance on to have a good time.

Not being familiar with Irish culture at all, Croatoa in CoH was my first exposure to Tuatha and all. Years later I ended up at the Dublin airport. They've got these neat infographics on the walls talking about mythology. Did I think "haha, stupid brown pumpkin monsters"? Nope! My reaction, as anyone's would, was "hey, I've seen those words before -- oooh, so that's the REAL story! Wow, that's really cool". It's not like anyone would take fiction as their source for global history. Previous exposure only serves to reinforce interest. Time to stop mincing words. Outrage culture types are seriously fucked in the head. Your entire premise is that people are dumb and their exposure to any form of media need to be tightly controlled lest they get consumed by the first thing they read. It takes such a grim view of humanity as a whole, and such an arrogant, egotistical outlook on one's imagined own superiority, to embrace that premise. Take a step back and try to have a better opinion of your fellow man. For that matter, if you think you're so smart and so above the rest of us, work your intellectual gifts on clean energy, curing cancer or some other noble promise, instead of being such an insufferable wanker on the Internet.

IMHO, within the context of getting hit 10% more, it doesn't matter whether you get hit 10 or 11 in 200 times, 10 or 11 in 2000 times or 10 or 11 in 200000000000 times to start with. Logically the only moment your mitigation matters is once incoming damage is high enough the possibility of dying exists. In which case, those 10 hits that do get in are at least close to what you can sustain. Once this point is reached, this extra 1 hit in 200 is still 10% more damage taken in practice, and it is possible for that extra 10% to tip you over the edge where you die rather than barely survive. Net result: you will need 10% more mitigation through other means to maintain the level of survivability you would have. But I'll join the chorus: for the purpose of general play, running 44.5% defense is perfectly fine. Likely you would never be able to tell the difference in a blind test. It's only important to be aware of the distinction if you have solo no insps survivability oriented challenge goals and want to squeeze every last possible performance drop out of your build.

No such assumption. This was a random example making a point about the lack of necessity to be at range full time for "range = defense" to be true. No intent to generalize that hypothetical example to a generalized melee:ranged ratio. There might be instances where that ratio is 3X, 4X or even 10X. There might be instances where that ratio is 1.1X or even 1X. I don't mean to make any balance suggestion or AT judgement. My post is solely focused on the idea range is defense. Well, damn! I'd like to know what standards of tightness you have in mind. With the ongoing moratium on game footage I can't upload my run to illustrate the point, but on x8 solo with all ambushes focused on me there were so many mobs I sometimes struggled to jump through them because they blocked all the available space. I named the example precisely because of that experience. I could just as well used office maps, blue caves, orange CoV caves, arachnos bases, manticore mansion, the warrior building or what have you. In just about any map there is always some wiggle room to jump around, even if it is obviously easier on an outdoor map with open skies than inside. Simply because you don't need vertical space. A horizontal hop backwards will cost you less time than it does the enemy in 99% of situations. I'm not sure how this disproves the idea range is defense. Your argument might be that the defense range offers is unnecessary. That's an entirely different topic I'm not too invested into personally. I think you're reading my whole post as a Sentinel vs Scrapper comparison, whereas it was solely an argument range is defense. I name Fire/Rad Scrapper because it is the most sensible "mirror" combination for the characteristics relevant to this argument: no active mitigation in the primary, and same secondary. I posit range is potentially useful the moment you jinx back even once. Whether range becomes important is of course a subjective statement you, I or anyone else ought to make for themselves given their particular playstyles and goals. Perhaps the defense offered isn't worth it. I strongly feel it is in most cases, but I don't have a solid theoretical argument as to why. I do find myself in strong agreement with Bill in that against most enemy factions, it only takes hovering above them vs standing in melee to see the magnitude of the difference. And even if in some select factions, that magnitude is less important, it doesn't mean it suddenly does nothing. Say a faction does 90% of the damage at range it does in melee, that's still 10% of the damage shaved off. That's the point I tried to address in my last paragraph. I don't believe BP is equally dangerous at range, simply because some enemies like the big frozen boss monsters I can't recall the name at the moment, have even more powerful melee attacks than their ranged attacks. A faction can be extremely dangerous at range, and even then still, slightly more dangerous than that in melee. If we flipped the problem around and talked about player powers, I think the logic at hand would be intuitive. For the purposes of pure DPS and against a static target, is it better to add Mind Probe to an attack chain or not? Perhaps you're already pushing a 300 DPS attack chain at range, hitting like a ton of bricks. And yet Mind Probe would still bump that up to, say, hypothetically, 330 DPS. I mean, when *I'm* forced at range... Range is definitely defense for enemies too, as my DPS lowers. The difference can be hard to perceive and it can even be meaningless in some instances. I fully agree that if against a hypothetical encounter one dies at range and if one dies in melee, then the difference in incoming damage is purely academic - at least up until you bring additional resources like insps and buffs, as to climb to the equilibrium point where you win the fight.

I love Elec Blast on Sentinels. Top tier damage. End drain is extremely potent, in large part due to Sentinel standards: having Thunderous Blast on a 90s base recharge as opposed to 180s means it is up every spawn, so everything is sapped by your first AoE salvo and then stays there if you keep attacking. Biggest pet peeve is Voltaic Sentinel. It's cost/animation efficient as is, especially if you use a macro so you don't have to deal with manually aiming the reticle. But efficiency be damned, casting it every minute is just a drag. Make it perma, or at least 5 minutes duration. Or let us have multiple Voltaic Sentinels out, with 2 or 3 minutes duration.

I cannot understand the idea range stops being effective defense if one isn't at range 100% of the time. If at a given instant an enemy was out of range thanks to your ranged nature, and if this enemy uses rangedAttack dealing X damage instead of meleeAttack dealing 2X damage, then you've avoided X damage. It doesn't matter if the next second this same enemy closes in and whacks you in melee. Beyond that, I find it actually very easy to argue range is defense close to 100% of the time. Even in an office map or a blue cave, and on a Sentinel using Mind Probe or Cremate. It takes one bunnyhop to clear some distance. The AI simply isn't designed to keep up with you. In the ITF, the Mission 2 caves are pretty tight. Especially on x8 with all the enemies packed around and the ambushes. I've done a +4/x8 no insps solo ITF on a Fire/Rad Sentinel running a grand total of 20% def and 70% res as passive/toggle mitigation, and no active knockdowns or what have you. There's no way in hell I could replicate this with a "mirror" Fire/Rad Scrapper running roughly the same defensive values, even though the Scrapper would have more HP, more absorb and slightly more def/res. That particular scenario requires jousting. Range is not only defense there, it's necessary defense. A Scrapper can joust as well, but their damage output will suffer more than a Sentinel. I don't think it makes sense to interpret "range = defense" as a blank pass to be invincible, no matter the base mitigation. Range doesn't nullify the damage of your enemies, it lessens it. If you lack enough mitigation to survive the lessened damage, yes, the result will be the same: you're dead either way. Just like if you're fighting a level 30 mob as a level 1, you're going to die just as quickly as if you fight a level 50 mob. Yet does it mean there is no damage difference between the level 30 mob and the level 50 mob? All we can conclude is you bit off more than you could chew.

Haij, I'd think you of all people would root for Sentinels, given that they have the best version of Regen. Which means it can be nerfed even harder.

It's amazing to think we've collectively bought about 1 million packs, judging by the number left for sale from the initial seed. Imagine the hours spent opening all these packs. The amount of clicks. That's also what, 10 trillion influence? Probably more than that with Winter Packs bought at full price. A number I find sobering, whenever I start getting too giddy with my middle-class low billions.

Aggro control is a strong, justifiable reason to go scrapper/brute over stalker with this combo. No question. Staff has some decent native tools to alleviate the running. Serpent's Reach is ranged, Eye of the Storm KDs, Sky Splitter KUs. It doesn't make up for the lack of aggro aura once enemy health gets low. But it's not as bad as some other sets. On the other hand, Staff damage is naturally midrange, and much of it is delivered in DoT through long animations, which deepens any "low damage" perception one may have. Stalker fixes that. I'm someone who doesn't care much for stalker mechanics and will go out of my way to make a scrapper or brute first, Giving up aggro control for more damage is always a hard decision. I agree that theoretical "more damage" sometimes doesn't end up to be true due to enemies running away. But in the specific case of Staff, the difference is large enough it feels worth it in the end. I've never been happy with Staff until I rerolled as a Stalker. YMMV.

Plus, you get Build Up instead of it being consumed for the sake of forms. Plus, you get the best form as an auto. Plus, the only power you lose, Innocuous Strikes, is arguably the weakest (still a decent power, but in practice Staff is bound by long animation times and fast recharges). Staff = Stalker is a no brainer unlike any other powerset. But if it has to be scrapper vs brute... Scrapper: - higher damage - can still hold aggro thanks to /bio Brute: - can push impressive mitigation through Guarded Spin, Form of the Body, Brute resistance caps and ATOs So between scrapper and brute, go scrapper for damage, brute for defense, no real gotchas. But really, go stalker and thank us later. Even if there is a case to be made for stalker /bio being weaker than scrapper or brute /bio, you'll still likely feel happier with the significantly improved damage output.