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Ringo

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Posts posted by Ringo

  1. The R-Auras have a base recharge of over 8 minutes, Empathy's strength is in having teammates to buff/heal and nothing else.

     

    Luckily MMs bring their own!

  2. Two thoughts:

     

    1) Adrenaline Boost gives a 100% recharge boost for 90s to the target in addition to the +Regen +Recovery and +Debuff Resist.  MM Pets don't benefit from anything that boosts their recharge.  If you're soloing it's the best option to give one of your pets AB.  But if you have anyone on a team, that buff should go to someone who gets the +recharge boost.

     

    2) While I think Mercs would work fine with /Empathy, it occurs to me that Beast MMs can benefit specifically from /Empathy because Fortitude + heals can do everything Fortify Pack does while not wasting the 20% damage boost of stacked Pack Mentality.  Saves you a power pick as well as the unfortunate Beast MM dilemma of ever using Fortify Pack

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  3. AR isn't a damage powerhouse but it does have quick cycling cone attacks for days (plus M30 grenade), and leveraging those cones for a screen full of orange numbers is one of the best parts of the set.  IMO trying to use the melee in your secondary with AR is going to feel a bit clunky.  I have a 50 AR/Pain Corr and jumping in and out of melee for the Pain Buff/Debuff targeting was only fun because my Corr was Resistance based and so getting hit (and not dying) was part of the excitement.

     

    So it can be done, and Martial has that teleport-like power to potentially make it easier, but it's going to be a more active playstyle than just blasting away

    • Like 1
  4. On 9/8/2023 at 9:02 PM, MonteCarla said:

    I really do wish there was an alternate animation for Force Bomb 😄

     

    I'm going to have to experiment with Rune of Protection for the Resistance Bonus. It's got a fixed uptime of 1/3, but there's got to be some interesting mileage in it either for mega-Resistance Brutes (one of my other hobbies!) or a Resist focused Defender with Rune, Epic Armor, maybe with Sonic Resonance or Pain Dom..? Hmmm...

    I have an AR/Pain Corr built for Resistances and I love it

  5. Here's the thread, the post by tomgreen has the build:

     

     

    Basically -recovery is what makes being a sapper work and Heat Exhaustion is the power you want for that

     

    Bonus points due to the Shocked mechanic making sappers hit harder

     

    Added:  and it's -recovery that allows you to sap AVs and GMs.  Taking away their end is hard, but keeping their end away is impossible without constant -end spam or decent -recovery

    • Thumbs Up 1
  6. No Dark love here?  Ridiculous!

     

    The set has -res, -acc, -dam, a group heal that does -regen, a pet that does all that too, plus the -regen of Howling Twilight (it rezzes people as a bonus).

     

    Increasing damage through buffs or -res means nothing if your hard target just regenerates its HP faster than you can dish it.  No regen though?  Doesn't matter if you're only doing -1hp per second, that target will go down

     

    (eventually)

  7. I see you've already chosen the pairing for you but I do want to throw in my usual plug for Plant/Storm.  Roots is an AoE immobilize that keeps mobs from scattering (which is helpful for getting the most out of Seeds of Confusion) but also lets them flop around from Sleet/Tornado/Lightning Storm.  Plant/Storm's two shortcomings are 1)End Management (Pumping out Lightning Storm while running Steamy Mist and Hurricane adds up quick) and slow TTK on hard single targets.  You'll never appreciate Confusion more than when you see how much damage is lost when the minions are dead and no longer wailing on that EB.  While my playstyle of "controlled chaos" may still be too chaotic for your tastes, Plant is one of the best sets to mitigate /Storm's chaotic nature.

     

    I'll also second Illusion/Traps.  Phantom Army allows you to do all of your trap setting in peace even in active combat and Traps has some massive debuffs plus everyone's favorite - force field generator - for mez protection.  My live main was ill/ff and ill/traps beats it hands down.  I've tanked AND debuffed Rommie in the ITF and had a dance party while doing it.  Adding a KB to KD IO to Phantasm is just icing on an already stacked cake.  I do miss the (very) old days of having 3 Phantasms though.  So much KB!

     

    Again, might not be suited to your playstyle, but it's something different, fun, and viable

    • Like 1
  8. On 9/25/2023 at 2:45 AM, MoonSheep said:

    i think what OP is referring to with the view on “holy trinity” is that oldschool CoH required much more cooperation between support ATs, damage and tanky type characters

     

    you’d often be very pleased to see a controller with ice slick or a rad to help buff and debuff. this would be complimented by a strong tank type lead to take the alpha, with blasters and scrappers ready to mash things up

     

    this compares to modern HC CoH where the focus is primarily just on damage, as support ATs have less value

    People *happy* to see an Ice Controller?  On Live?!

    Now you're just making stuff up!

    • Haha 2
  9. 13 minutes ago, cranebump said:

     

    Right? Simple things like "Snipers will stay at a distance and try to pick you off" (speaking of which, shouldn't every sniper have some form of stealth?). These guys fall right into mobs for easy destruction. Bosses that hit and run. Bosses that dive under cover when you're hovering and waiting on them. Bosses that try to pull you into the lava. Tactics. It'd be nice...

    I think trying to implement these things where they don't cause bugs in thousands of different missions and environments on a game running on 20 year old code is a bit of an undertaking

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  10. Kudos to this thread.  I don't agree with the premise, but it has made me realize that while I personally eschewed "healers" and generally avoided people who declared themselves as such, I've never once looked at how the game must appear to them.  That's led me to having very little empathy (hah) for those who think having a "healer" is important and their gameplay experience.

     

    My apologies to the "healer" crowd.  I never said we couldn't coexist, but I definitely acted like we couldn't.  And I can now see how easily that could turn into a detrimental CoX experience, which is the opposite of what I value in the CoX community.  My bad.

     

    As far as the devs and the evolution of the game  - I personally don't believe there was as much as a push for killing the Holy Trinity as there was an interest in making as many powersets and builds viable.  Combine the smoothing out of low performing builds versus the higher performing builds, plus the introduction of IOs and Incarnates leading to incredible power creep, and you now have a game where every build can be viable and self-sufficient.  Which, naturally, mutes the reactive healer playstyle designed to shore up weaknesses - because there aren't any weaknesses to shore up.  Instead the MinMax optimal strategy is to use buff/debuff powers as force multipliers to utilize the power creep each build can leverage.

     

    Personally that's a thing I have enjoyed.  But that doesn't mean everyone does, or should.  And I think the availability of doing content in a "No IO, No Incarnates" mode would possibly lead to players who use that mode to have more structured team composition and more complexity in how the team works together.

     

     

  11. On 9/16/2023 at 8:28 PM, egoprovince said:

    Yes? /Storm is great but I found it exhausting to play.

    Pair it with Plant.  Roots keeps everything right where you want it, but still allows knockdown from Sleet/Tornado/Lightning Storm for mitigation

     

    Slightly at odds with Seeds of Confusion, but by the time you're throwing all your /Storm stuff you really only use Seeds as a way to mitigate the Alpha strike

  12. Well if Panacea has a 2.9% chance to fire every 10s it also depends on how many different targets its going to check that against.

     

    If it checks against you and your 6 pets standing in the patch, that jumps from 2.9% chance of seeing it fire to a 20% chance

     

    So the important bits are:

    Who does the proc roll a check against?

    When the proc fires, who gets the benefit?

     

     

  13. 2 hours ago, aethereal said:

     

    It's clearly both.

     

    And to the extent that it's a test, that is, to the extent that you care about not pylon times per se but about overall single target DPS performance, it's a test that overvalues the trait of "able to slot -res procs."

     

    This is extremely understandable and straightforward.  The purple patch makes -resistance much more valuable at +0 (which pylons are) than at +3 or +4 (which most other hard content is).

     

    This doesn't make pylon tests worthless: all testing is necessarily imperfect.  The map is not the territory, but that doesn't make maps useless.  But if you understand the ways in which the map is imperfect, you need to compensate for them.  This thread is like someone saying, "we can finally go to Greenland; it's huge!" and then getting angry at me when I point out that mercator maps greatly exaggerate the size of Greenland.

    I think it's more like you pointing out that my proficiency at hitting a stationary target with a throwing axe doesn't directly correlate to my proficiency at hitting a charging swan.  You are correct, but that has zero bearing on my practice of throwing at a stationary target, and is only tangentially related to why I do it.

     

    I understand that -res procs produce higher efficiency against even con targets as compared to +4's.  It's just not relevant when comparing Pylon tests to other Pylon tests.

  14. On 10/11/2022 at 4:15 PM, aethereal said:

    There's nothing wrong with it.  If the question is, "Who can win the minigame of 'beat a pylon fastest'?" then by all means do whatever you want to make the pylon die faster (but, I mean, probably roll a MM, right?).

     

    But if we're trying to use a pylon time as an approximation of the performance of the set in ST DPS, we should be aware that -res procs give pretty strongly differentiated results on pylons versus most other hard targets.  And a set that can slot a lot of -res procs will do great on pylon times, but if that's it's big virtue, it won't do nearly as well in other ST DPS scenarios.

    It's not a minigame, it's a way of testing via setting a common baseline for all ATs.  It's not a comprehensive test but it does tell you performance within a given setting that you can then compare to other builds.

     

    The ability to slot -res procs alter the results of the test.  That's data you have to have in order to evaluate the change.

     

    If pylon times don't give you the data you want to use then you need to develop and run a different test

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