Gigajoule
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Posts posted by Gigajoule
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If anyone who plays the game reads this: Please Sell All Recipes You Find to WW Regardless of Type and Level. Some of us with alternate play styles like to slot things differently.
I will give it a shot! I confess I've been vendoring set recipes for stun, sleep, fear, etc., on the theory that people slot everything for damage, damage, and more damage.
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Help me understand what the issue is. If you are "playing 100% alone," why does it matter what level other people are? You say "I want to [...] not be level 20 when everyone else is lvl 45," but if you aren't grouping with anyone else, who cares what these other people do? In fact, them leveling up and leaving you behind means less lag for you in King's Row.
If the story arcs are what you are really interested in, then just play them. If you don't like them, then don't. If exp is raised even more than it has been already, you will quickly run into the problem of leveling too fast for the story arcs and missing out on a great many of them. In fact, that happens already to literally everyone other than you.
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I found the transition from regular old Paragon City to First Ward a bit jarring. One minute your contacts are all 'The Skulls are bad. Go to the warehouse and stop them,' and then you get to First Ward and they're all 'Well scronk my noffler, looks like we've got ourselves a proper jumbunglin here, the Ifflepiff isn't going to like that one bit.'
Yeah, the Resistance has this weird, Clockwork Orange-esque slang thing going on. The more I interact with Resistance NPCs and story arcs, the more convinced I am that they are simply the Praetorian version of Primal Earth's Freakshow, although I don't believe this is explicitly stated by anyone in-game.
Weird slang/jargon: check
Costumes cobbled together out of mismatched techy bits: check
Generally anarchist/"punk" mindset: check
I vaguely remember one of the Praetorian story arcs involved the Resistance trying to blow up a hospital in order to make the sheeple open their peepers and overthrow Marcus Cole. To me, that plan strongly parallels (and makes about the same amount of sense as) the Freakshow's plan to blow up Terra Volta in order to overthrow the social order and create a world "without divisions or classes" in the Penelope Yin TF.
I'm sorry for little offtopic but will I have access to these story arcs if I starter in Atlas Park?Starting from level 20, you can do the Praetorian First Ward arcs, which lead into the Night Ward arcs. These arcs have some really interesting, though sometimes borderline surreal, writing. You'll want to have some basic familiarity with the Praetoria backstory though, or it will be confusing. They reference people and events that appear in the "newbie" Praetorian arcs, which only native Praetorians can do.
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I don't know what the answer would be to fix the runaway inflation. It is a problem that plagues nearly every MMO. There may not be an answer at all-- hyperinflation may simply be an inevitability in this kind of game. But I do know this: boosting influence drops would definitely make the inflation worse. Pumping more money into the system is what inflation is. The rising prices are merely the symptom of the rapidly expanding money supply.
Treating the symptom has its place though. And I don't necessarily disagree with what the Homecoming team has done in their efforts to stanch the bleeding, as it were, with these price controls on salvage. But prices of recipes and whatever else can be bought on the market will continue to spiral upward so long as an enormous imbalance exists between the inf entering the system (via drops, mission rewards, etc), and the inf leaving the system (via auction house fees, IO crafting fees, etc). Eventually I suspect we will see price controls on recipes as well, once prices are deemed to be "too high".
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That is for hiding buff icons, etc. I think the OP wants the orange numbers that appear over people's heads when they get damaged to go away.
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I think having all unfulfilled bids auto-cancel after 90 days would be reasonable.
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I feel like the basic problem with the whole prestige system was the prestige itself, by which I mean yet another alternate currency in the game to keep track of. It would have been a lot less irritating if base upkeep, base items, etc, could have been paid for directly with standard influence/infamy. That would have solved many of the basic issues people had with bases back in the day while also helping to stabilize the inf economy a bit by being an inf sink.
I don't know why the original devs felt like every new system added to the game had to have its own alternative currency to go with it. I can only assume they thought the inf economy was fundamentally broken and new game features needed to be quarantined off from it. But their go-to solution caused more problems than it solved, at least in the case of prestige. And the additional complexity that multiple currency systems brought to the game didn't really add value from the perspective of player experience, IMHO.
Oh well, water under the bridge. I don't know if anything needs changing at this point; having everything be free seems to be working all right. Even so, I would not be strongly opposed to paying a small base upkeep (in inf, not prestige). A base with teleporters is a convenient thing, and the inf economy probably could use a few more inf sinks. Maybe keep all base items free, but just have a monthly inf-based upkeep based on plot size, or number of TP beacons, or something? Just spitballing here. Or just forget it and keep it all free-- that would be fine too.
Just don't bring back the old prestige system, please please please don't do that.
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My suggestion would be Ice Armor/Dark Melee (or Ice Armor/Ice Melee) then. Dark Melee debuffs the enemy's chance to hit, which is cumulative with Ice Armor's high Defense, making you extremely hard to hit. Alternatively, Ice Melee has the side effect of slowing the enemy's rate of attacks, and Ice Armor still has really good Defense so you rarely get hit when they do finally take a swing, so that also is good synergy.
Regarding Endurance, most Tanker sets struggle with End (except for Electric Armor), but Ice Armor is not nearly as bad as some. Energy Absorption goes a long way toward fixing your End problems. And Dark Melee also gets a power that gives you Endurance (Dark Consumption), but it comes pretty late. And, pro tip from a former Ice Armor Tanker main if you decide to go with Ice Armor: don't bother with Icicles. You don't need it for aggro since Chilling Embrace is such a phenomenal taunt aura by itself, and the piddling damage it does is not worth the massive Endurance cost.
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1 group had 3 characters all named very close to the same as each other (they simply re-arranged the 4 letters making up the name). I can assure you I saw them leveling up over and over and over while watching them.
If I had to guess, it was one guy multi-boxing eight characters, with one low-level character in the group who was the group's leader and the others all exemplared down to that character's level. Then all he would have to do is run around with only one of the characters killing Skulls and Hellions, and the higher level toons would be raking in experience and influence appropriate to their own true level. If I am not mistaken, there is no penalty to gaining exp and inf if you are far away from the rest of the group, but you do have to be in the same zone.
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It made sense I guess, back in the day, to "revamp" Galaxy City. As the game matured, there was a lot less demand for lower-level content and correspondingly higher demand for higher-level content. Having two newbie zones was not efficient any more, so they closed one of them.
I understand why they did it, but I didn't really like it. GC was my preferred zone to send my own new characters to, instead of Atlas Park. I preferred the grittier, working-class vibe of GC.
(It would have been nice when the Homecoming servers launched to have the old Galaxy City back for a while, if that could have been arranged somehow. The crowding in Atlas Park was pretty insane those first few days. An extra newbie zone to spread out the mass influx would maybe have made things a little smoother. Oh well. In the end, something like that might have been more trouble than it was worth to get working, who knows.)
But now, I don't know if it would be beneficial at this point to devote limited dev resources to bringing back GC as a newbie zone. I mean, continuity-wise, they could just say the meteor/Shivan/whatever situation has been handled (great work, non-Outbreak level one heroes), give the buildings and streets in GC some visible damage/cracks/craters/etc, put in a mix of new and old Galaxy City story-arcs and missions, and open it back up. It could work from a continuity standpoint, but it would be a pretty major content-development undertaking, possibly beyond the scope of the Homecoming project. The Homecoming team probably has plenty of more pressing concerns to look at-- actual new content, revamped zones, etc, is probably a long, long way off at best.
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It's possible? Tank with VERY high defenses without exhausting endurance? How to build? Which secondary?
The "very high defenses" is the easy part. There are several valid ways to build a ludicrously tough tank, and most Tanker primaries can be built to insane levels of defense and/or resistance without too much difficulty (some easier than others, of course). The "without exhausting endurance" is what will be tricky. But, you might want to be more specific with your question. When you say "without exhausting endurance", do you mean without the use of a "crash" power like Unstoppable, or do you mean without endurance problems in general?
If what you are looking for is a Tanker primary that is tough enough to fill normal Tanker expectations while not really having to worry much about Endurance, give Electric Armor a look. Power Sink is great.
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Which of these allows more survivability and flexibility
The short answer would be Stone Armor has better survivability and Invuln has better flexibility. Stone is probably the tankiest of all Tanker primaries, but it is also the least mobile.
Invuln is quite good. It is the most popular Tanker primary for a reason.
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My current plan with my Elec/Rad Tanker is to go with Unbreakable Guard x 4 in Charged Armor, Static Shield, Conductive Shield, and Grounded, with an eye toward soft-capping Melee Defense (and "pretty good" AoE and Ranged Defense). This of course is on top of capped Resistance to Smashing/Lethal/Energy (and "pretty good" Resistance to everything else besides Toxic). However, I'm probably going to wait until this character is able to slot level 50 enhs before I make the push for Unbreakable Guards.
(My plan with my other powers probably doesn't have as much relevance to you since I have a different secondary powerset.)
Best advice as to which IO sets to use right now: figure out which of the AT-specific Enhancements that you prefer (Might of the Tanker or Gauntleted Fist), and go ahead and get them with Reward Merits (from the Merit Vendor) and slot them as soon as you are able. These enhs scale with your level, and are also likely BIS for many builds. You'll want to plan your build ahead of time to save on respecs or Enh Unslotters down the road, but definitely make getting the AT-specific Enhancements a priority (assuming they are part of your build, which they probably should be haha).
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Hecatomb and Armageddon were a tad pricey back in the day, as I recall. People didn't usually put them up on the Auction House either because the cut WW would take for putting up a multi-billion inf recipe was prohibitive. Sales had to be arranged privately, complicated by the fact that the asking price for some of the Hecatomb pieces was higher than the game's inf cap haha.
The purple Disorient set Absolute Amazement has mostly the same set bonuses as Hecatomb, but if I had to guess (pure speculation), there isn't nearly as much demand for it. You could probably shave a few billion influence off the cost of the set by having Absolute Amazement x 6 in Boxing, Touch of Death x 6 in Smite, generic DefBuff IO x 2 in Hover (dropping a slot), and drop another slot in Stamina. That still puts you at 43.8% Defense to S/L/F/C. Could probably tweak it further to get back to the soft-cap, but I am losing my patience with Mid's/Pine's fiddliness when it comes to moving around enh slots.
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Was SS ever an option for Scrappers? It's been so long I don't remember.
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I had a friend play his tank last night who was 2 levels higher than me and I was holding more agro than him I can't remember his build. That said I don't know what he has slotted for his aura. Mine is half slow and the other half taunt enhancements.
The funny thing about taunt auras is that they can't really be fixed with enhancements. Taunt enhancements increase the duration of the taunt effect but don't increase its magnitude, and (with a few exceptions) the taunt effect does not stack with itself (that is, additional applications of the taunt effect merely refresh it instead of making it extra taunty, if that makes sense; this is why taunt enhancements are not as great as people seem to think). If your Taunt aura is subpar, as is reportedly the case for Willpower (which has both a slow tick rate and low magnitude), then you will just have to work harder to keep aggro, I guess slotting up Taunt (the power) itself and spamming it.
As for slow, unless they changed it, Slow enhs only enhance the effect of slowed movement speed of the enemies (referred to as "snare" in some other games). It does not give extra -Rchg debuff (i.e., slowing their attack rate). Something to bear in mind.
I used to run with just a single End Rdx IO in Chilling Embrace. But in my case, the enemies were also being slowed by my Ice Melee attacks which were putting them at the slow cap anyway. With a different secondary, the extra snare effect of slotting up Chilling Embrace might be worth it.
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It depends on what you are wanting to do with the character.
Tanking for a group will be much more difficult with a Scrapper, comparatively speaking. Scrappers can tank, to be sure, but it's harder. Tankers are the best tanks (hence the name). Not necessarily because of the Resistance cap either-- Tankers of all kinds have an inherent edge when it comes to controlling aggro, and controlling aggro is the most important thing when it comes to tanking.
On the other hand, soloing is a lot harder for a Tanker, comparatively speaking. Tankers can solo, but it is very slow and inefficient (depending on powerset). Scrappers are some of the best soloers (soloists?).
Brutes are quite solid at both styles of play.
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As far as aggro management goes, tanks are pretty solid overall but I do think ice had a bit of an edge.
This has been my experience also. Keeping aggro seems a bit more challenging on my Elec Armor Tanker than it did on my old Ice Armor Tanker. I have been putting it down to being rusty at the game after 7 years, and while that is doubtless the case, I think there is something about Ice Armor that makes it easier to control aggro.
I found an old guide to tanking in CoH that may shed some light. It says the taunt auras are not created equal. Most Tanker primaries have a Taunt aura that pulses once a second or once per two seconds. Ice Armor's Chilling Embrace pulses twice a second. In addition, Chilling Embrace does not make a to-hit check; it just auto-hits. (Taunt auras that do damage, like Elec Armor's Lightning Field, do have a to-hit check-- if it misses, the enemy isn't taunted that tick. Also, damaging taunt auras tend to pulse only once per two seconds) So you can kind of see how if you are just running/jumping around tagging enemies with the taunt aura (hopefully doing other stuff also), enemies may sometimes slip through the cracks either because the timing of the pulse wasn't quite right or the aura itself missed when you ran past that enemy. Chilling Embrace is much, much more reliable in this regard.
On top of that, having all the enemies massively slowed makes it easier (from the player's perspective) to manage the glorious chaos of trying to tank seventeen enemies at once.
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The healer is probably casting Clear Mind (from the Empathy set) and/or Tactics (from the Leadership set), both of which give +Res to certain crowd-control effects, but no +Res to actual damage. I'm not aware of anything an Empathy Defender can take that would give damage resist. (It is possible there's something I don't know about though.)Thanks for the great reply.
With a group of friends, we have an Emp/? Defender, 2 controllers of different types, a Staff/? Scrapper and a Blaster again don't remember their skills.
I know the healer friend of mine is stacking something resistances for sure, and I think they also went Leadership to add those buffs to the group as well.
By the way, the soft cap on Defense is only 45%. (The reason it's so low compared to the Resist hard cap is that same-level enemies start from a baseline of a 50% chance to miss, which with the way attack rolls are calculated in CoH, means that a Defense of "45%" translates into a 95% chance for a same-level minion to miss their attack: 50 + 45 = 95.) An Empathy Defender who slots up Fortitude big-time can get close to 25% Defense on that power easily with just SOs, and if they are going big on Maneuvers (from the Leadership line), that's another ~5%. If one of your Controller friends has a power that buffs your Defense another 10-12% (and there are several Controller secondaries that can do that), then you are already really close to the soft-cap (25 + 5 + 10 = 40) even before applying any of your own buffs. Combat Jumping (~3%), Wet Ice (1%), and one set bonus would put you over the cap. (Technically you could get there without CJ and WI, just from set bonuses, but you will want to be running those two powers anyway for the protection against crowd control.)
And, going past the soft-cap doesn't help against higher-level enemies (just in case anyone is wondering), since the soft-cap kicks in before the multipliers for higher level and/or higher rank enemies are applied. The only thing that having over 45% Defense does for you is give some additional padding against any Defense debuffs. That's why I say Ice Armor is less efficient with a group that can buff Defense massively. Ice Armor shines best with a support partner who can massively buff Resistance.
That said, if you like Ice Armor, it's fine. My usual group back in the day was me (Ice/Ice Tanker), an Empathy/Archery Defender, and an Earth/Storm Controller. We played together for years and did all right, in a wide variety of content types, from low levels to high levels, though I was keenly aware that our group set-up was not as efficient as it could be, due to the extreme overkill on +Def and complete lack of any +Res, and general lack of damage output. We had fun though.
Nonetheless, since my Defender buddy wants to stick with Empathy/Archery, I've decided a Resistance-based Tanker primary is the way to go this time around.
Regarding your secondary, War Mace is probably fine, but since the Scrapper is doing Smashing damage with the Staff Fighting, you might consider a secondary that is something other than Smashing, especially if the Blaster also does Smashing (Water, Sonic, and Energy Blast all do composite damage of Smashing combined with another type-- I don't think there is a pure Smashing Blaster primary). The reason for that is, some enemies are highly resistant to particular damage types (e.g. Vahzilok Cadavers are resistant to Smashing), so diversifying your damage types is a good idea, when possible.
Speaking for myself, my preference in Tanker secondaries is for my secondary to add value for the team in some way even if I'm not main-tanking. Spines, Dark Melee, Ice Melee, Psionic Melee, and Radiation Melee all fit this bill. (Attacks that apply Disorient or Knockdown, or that drain End, kind of fit that criteria, but I don't like them nearly as much since Archvillains, Giant Monsters, and whatnot are usually immune to such shenanigans. And damage is "nice" but not my main priority when considering tank builds.)
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How close to soft-capped defense can you get with an Ice Armor Tanker?
IIRC, you can slot up Energy Absorption such that you can keep it up constantly and also soft-cap your S/L Defense even just draining one enemy. Pretty sure this requires IOs to do though.
In a typical group situation, you usually won't have to worry about that, however. In an 8-man, there will almost always be someone with a +Def buff of some kind (Maneuvers if nothing else), and an Ice Armor Tanker usually doesn't need very much to get to the soft-cap (assuming they can't get there themselves).
I usually roll with the same people so what I'm looking for is High Defence, High Taunt. I like Ice armor because it slows all the mobs around me, and it seems decent overall. Ice/Mace was my main back in the day but I can see the benefits of going DM. As far as Primary/Secondary what fits the bill for highest Defence + Taunt I'm willing to try new combinations that best fit my group.
So far as I know, all Tanker sets have excellent taunting abilities, with the possible exception of Willpower, which reportedly has a weaker Taunt aura. (I have not tried a WP Tanker, so I don't know how well it works in practice.)
If you run with the same people usually, what will work best will be whatever synergizes with what they're running. If you run with a Defender/Corrupter/Controller partner who massively buffs Defense (Empathy, Force Field, Cold Dom, etc), you might want to consider a more Resist-based Tanker instead. (That is part of the reason I switched from Ice Armor to Electric Armor this time around-- my usual partner is an Empathy Defender with massively slotted up Fortitude. Since my old Ice Armor Tanker could soft-cap Def all on her own, the additional +Def of Fortitude went to waste.)
On the other hand, if you run with a partner who buffs +Res (e.g. Thermal Radiation), or who only slightly buffs +Def (Storm Summoning, Dark Miasma, etc), an Ice Armor tank is ideal. And I will say the slowing effect of Ice Armor is great, providing both damage mitigation and helping to control the flow of battle.
Of course, above all, run a powerset that you enjoy playing.
If I remember correctly you really can't Judge a tank on its Tankyness until level 20+ cause with my Ice/Mace Tank only level 12 I'm soloing all my missions to get caught up to my friends without very much health loss. Honestly, I don't believe I use any Healing inspiration other than to cycle them out for more defense, dmg, and endurance.True enough. I will say, if you are just wanting to level to catch up with your friends and aren't necessarily hung up on seeing the story from the story arcs, then grouping, especially TFs, is definitely the way to go. It's like 100x faster than soloing (for Tankers at least... other ATs will have different experiences). Tankers can solo, but it's very slow and inefficient.
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The to-hit debuffs of Dark Melee synergize very well with Ice Armor. In fact I would say that DM synergizes better with Ice Armor than Ice Melee does. If DM had been available years ago when I was rolling my Ice/Ice main, I probably would have been Ice/Dark instead. But when the Dark Melee proliferation came down, I felt like I'd invested too much time in my Ice/Ice to start over. (As it was, that character ended up taking some dark-themed Incarnate powers, I think Void Judgment? Or whatever the dark PBAoE Incarnate power is called-- it was really handy.)
"What is considered a top tier Tank Weapon now a days? Some of the new ones I've never seen before."
Tankers back in the day were extremely limited in powerset choices. If I recall correctly, a lot of the Tanker-benefiting proliferation happened late in the live game's life, so late that I don't think a consensus ever emerged as to what the top Tanker powers were. (Compared to the situation in 2004, when ~95% of high-level Tankers were running Invuln/SS.) But surely DM is at least in the discussion for being a top-shelf Tanker secondary. Spines may give it a run for its money. Staff Fighting may also be worth a look (it has a cone attack that also buffs Def).
Currently my own highest level Tanker is Elec Armor/Radiation Melee. I like that build a lot, and it fits my character concept well, but it probably isn't going to ever be considered top-tier in terms of adding tankiness. Rad Melee improves the whole group's DPS though by debuffing enemy Defense (similar to Radiation Blast from other AT's of course, but not many people run Rad Blast anymore, it seems).
Which reminds me, when talking about top-tier Tanker secondaries (or primaries), do you mean in terms of actual tanking? Endurance-management? Soloing? Damage? Mobility? What the top is will be different depending on what your priorities are.
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I think Corruptors are a lot of fun. Scourge (the Corruptor innate) adds pretty good damage.
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I played an Ice/Axe tanker in Beta (2004) and early in release, switched to an Ice/Ice tanker maybe a year after the game came out and that was still my main when the game shut down. Used to occasionally main tank those Incarnate raid things (don't recall what their exact term is), so Ice Armor is definitely viable for a tanker. War Mace I don't have any experience with, but it's probably fine. If I had to guess though, it is probably not top-tier for damage. (War Mace's side effect is that it causes Disorient? Am I remembering that right? WM was not very popular, I seem to recall.)
Concerning how builds have changed...
Everyone gets Fitness for free now, so that will be some slots opened up compared to how you were built before.
Also, Presence (I assume taking the Provoke power), in my opinion isn't necessary to hold aggro any more. I do remember the days when virtually all Tankers had to take Provoke in addition to Taunt in order to keep aggro reliably. But that isn't necessary any more. Keeping aggro is quite easy (unless there's another tanker of the same level in your group).
Leadership I was never too keen on for Tankers. It is possible to hit the Def cap without it as an Ice Armor tank anyway.
Probably the best thing to do would be to just play, take powers that seem interesting, and see what you think. Can always respec later.
How do you feel about Radiation Melee
in Tanker
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I am up to 41 on my Elec Armor/Rad Melee Tanker and I like it a lot.
I haven't been able to find a log-parser for CoH that actually works, so I can't say how much extra damage Contamination contributes in practice. I will say I like the combo-y nature of consuming Contaminations with Radiation Siphon for a heal though-- that is a fun mechanic to play with for me (though some people may find it fiddly/frustrating). RS is (at least according to Pine's) a more Endurance-efficient heal than the similar Siphon Life from Dark Melee. And note that if you start the animation and the enemy dies before you hit, you do still get the heal, assuming you don't miss, which is nice.
A neat trick to use with Rad Melee at low- to mid-levels when you don't have enough attacks to fill out a respectable attack chain is to lean on Sands of Mu from the P2W vendor. For most people SoM is not good to use past the first few levels because it can't be slotted so it misses constantly. But slap a few Defense debuffs on the bad guy and suddenly Sands is perfectly serviceable.
Overall I'd say it's totally rad!
...Sorry, I'll show myself out now.