TygerDarkstorm

Sandy Claws, huh?

@Jaxman100 I'll bring Dung Beetle out for this one. She's a Stone Melee/Bio Armor Brute

Bummed I had to miss yesterday, but love the screens from your guys' run! All the blues are so pretty. Look forward to seeing what gets planned for this upcoming Saturday. 🙂

Actually, I had this happen in an ITF multiple times on my fire/dark controller well before Issue 27 was released. It was getting to the point that my group was calling me Jesus, lol. I have no idea what was causing it, and how to duplicate it, so I wasn't sure whether to come to the forums about it because I had never had that happen before.

@TraumaTrain Scratch what I originally said; I won't be able to make it tomorrow. We're having family come over and decorating for Christmas so I'll be busy all day.

EEEEEEE!! Omg you have no idea how excited I am to see Jet Jaguar roll across this thread!! I was a huge Godzilla nerd as a kid and this movie was one of the few I owned on VHS. Love your interpretation of Jet Jag-u-ar (always got a kick of how they say it in the movie; I can't say his name any other way, lol). 😄

Eeyup, you're a bit late to the party. 😛 It was a QoL change made to make it not be so detrimental to have an anchor target killed.

@TraumaTrain I'll be there Saturday on Cyberetica; she's a Peacebringer

Mark me TBD please. 🙂 I'll be there, just not sure on who yet.

I was going to say something similar to this. It's not that hard to pull her off the catwalk with a ranged attack and let her run off of it before the party engages her.

You guys look wonderful! I look forward to seeing what next week's theme will be. @Midnyte wonderful work capturing the hydra's derpy mouth! I didn't even know those boogers really had faces. 🤣

You guys are so creative!

Oh! I have a similar character: Elaina Wraith - Rad/Empathy Corruptor. She's a villainous mad scientist.

Some shots I took from last week. 🙂

Yes please! I love rad melee but man do some of those powers feel like they need a reduction in animation time.

Radical Reptile - Rad/Fire Brute

@DSorrow and @Carnifax summed up what I was trying to say quite nicely. This isn't World of Warcraft or other games based around the holy trinity where a healer is a thing. Yes, heals have a place in this game, but they shouldn't be your main focus. That's why we have support AT's, not healers.

I never said every character needs to be fully optimized. I'm not a min/max player. However, a dedicated healer is just not a needed thing and I think you're missing what we mean when we say "dedicated healer" as it applies to this game. A "dedicated healer" is someone like the OP--a person who usually picks empathy and picks pretty much only the powers from the empathy powerset, and often dips into the medicine pool for even more heals, and then contributes nothing else to a team because they're waiting for green bars to move. Yes, even in a duo that's useless and wasting one half of the duo's time. Whereas if that same empath were to actually pick up some of their attacks and offensive powers, now they can fill time in between buffs/debuffs/healing with attacks. Sure, they may not do much damage, but the faster mobs are dying, the safer everyone is anyway. And yes, this applies to running in a duo as well; in fact, I would think it would be even more prevalent in a duo. And for the other people trying to say that healing is necessary and yada yada--we know. We have never said that healing cannot be useful. I have a water/pain corr who once spent a good chunk of a TF healing instead of using her attacks because for whatever reason the team was quite squishy. Healing has its place, but it should never be the only thing you focus on. @Nemu summed things up quite nicely in their post and their description of how to play empathy is what I aspire to be on my pain defender; but that doesn't mean I don't also take my attacks and slot them.

Because, as mentioned by myself and others, this game doesn't require, need, or desire dedicated healers, not even on MSR's. You should be doing more than heal and waiting for green bars to move.

As someone who used to main a "pure" empathy defender back in the days when those were viable and somewhat desirable (though never with the medicine pool because lol what?) (leveling up pre-IO era), I have not really touched the powerset since I've returned to the game, specifically for the reasons Sir Mishkin outlined in his post, so I won't reiterate what's been said. If I were to run empathy again, it would probably be on a controller, corruptor or MM, with focus on bringing all my other tools to the party and not just my healing. What some people new to this game, and possibly some returning players, seem to not realize with CoX is that dedicated healers are just not a thing or not needed in this game. If you are only focused on healing, even at the lower levels where it's more useful/desirable, you're being a bit of a hindrance to your team. My thermal/sonic defender may not put out a lot of damage, but I am rarely just sitting around waiting for people to get hurt. I am applying/reapplying shields, finding the hardest target and smacking them with debuffs, forging my damage dealers, and then shouting at things to amplifying my team's damage and help kill things faster. Chances are I end up missing a heal because most people can take care of themselves that I'm rarely watching green bars anyway. At level 46 I'm still a little undecided how I feel on the character as a whole and worry about her not being useful, but I still like to bring her out from time to time. I also have a baby pain defender in the works, though I decided to go fire primary on her for concept/bit more damage--which I now realize means she may be better as a corr, lol. Once you get out of the "I need to be a dedicated healer" mindset, I find that support characters have become a lot more fun. I have been trying a lot of different sets I haven't before, and take and slot my attacks so that I am doing something to contribute to the team outside of my buffs/debuffs/heals. And sometimes it's fun to be on a support toon that doesn't heal at all, like cold, TA, poison (has a heal, but it's not very good), etc.

I have not really heard that before. Most people I see talking about them consider them pretty tanky, which is one of the reasons that they pair nicely with /kin. They're not a top tier set, which is fine, but they don't suffer the way mercs or ninjas do. I'm not sure where you're getting this from, but it doesn't fit not just my personal experience with beasts, nor that of other avid beast/ players on these forums/reddit. The thread was provided last page, but I'll link it here to provide some raw data to back up my point:

But beasts don't actually underperform? Like, there's a whole thread dedicated to testing out the MM primaries and beasts were a long way from underperforming. I know that was in a specific environment and such, but I know I'm not the only beast MM player who agrees that their damage isn't as anemic as a lot of people make it out to be, especially when paired with /kin.

Actually, after checking my calendar, I would like to keep my spot for this Saturday, please. Next Saturday I won't be able to make it since I have to get blood work done.

If you have something ready to go, feel free to take my spot. 🙂 I've done a few of these as it is and don't mind giving up my spot this time around for you. But yeah, we're usually deciding theme and which TF/SF to do while we're raiding on Saturdays, so the sign-ups happen shortly after the raid.

I mean, I sort of did when I said that some of a blaster's hardest hitting attacks are their melee abilities.... I may not be as into the number crunching and such as some of the other forum users, but I made my initial post based on a lengthy amount of reading from those whose knowledge exceeds mine. A blaster is intended to deal damage, period. Maybe they started off intended to be ranged primarily, but the game evolved past that point, and if you look at even the abilities in the primaries, a great many of them need you to be in melee range or close to it. The T9 nukes for example--they are now crashless and one of the strongest hitting powers blasters have; they are also PBAoE so you need to be in the middle of the mob to use them. Given how sturdy blasters can be built these days, there is very little reason for them not to blap when the time calls for it unless it's for character, thematic, and/or personal reasons. What the game manual said in 2004 doesn't mean much to where the game was at when it shut down in 2012, and where it's at now in 2020. Both blasters and dominators should learn to feel comfortable jousting in and out of melee.