Psi-bolt

I wonder instead of a server wide boost that folks can't opt out of, why we couldn't just add more options to the START vendor. There's no profit motive, so why couldn't we have a 3x, 4x, etc. buff at the vendor. Gives people more choices but doesn't force people who don't want that to have it. I'll admit that I thought it was both awesome and kinda sucky to be level 33 after doing DFB, Posi, and Synapse.

Currently, the Synapse Task Force has 10 door missions, five of which require you to defeat all enemies. The remaining ones include 4 Boss room fights (Bertha, Long Tom, Clockwork Lord, and Clockwork King) and one rescue the captives. Most of this is just filler and the TF could be pared down without losing much, if any, of the story. I have great faith in the developers' ability to rewrite this TF, but I would offer the following. It seems that the TF is in two parts: Part 1 is foiling the Clockwork's plan to divert Steel Canyon's power to the Clockwork King; First defeat all to investigate what's happening; Find out what the plan is from Positron; Run around to three substations to stop Clockwork; Part 2 is tracking down and defeating the Clockwork King. Having stopped the plot to divert Steel's power, Synapse wants you to Patrol and then track down King. After the first patrol, you get sent to an office building to a defeat all because your scans showed a high concentration of Clockwork After clearing out the building you get sent on another Patrol to find Headquarters which is unsuccessful. Synapse then hears about a big Clockwork named Bertha going into an abandoned office building. Upon defeating Bertha you find a distinctive Clockwork piece. Synapse sends you to the place the part comes from. Upon defeating Long Tom and rescuing the Foreperson, he tells you that they sent the piece to only three locations. The remainder of the TF is going to those three warehouses where you first rescue hostages, defeat the Clockwork Lord and finally, the Clockwork King. Babbage come over to play after the Lord. That's how it stands now. There is a lot of filler even in the story. The first mission isn't described as a defeat all and I think if it were instead an investigation mission or a Boss room kill it would be better. Next, I think you could combine all the substations into one mission. There is no story based reason it has to be three missions. That could eliminate 2 more defeat all missions. The last defeat all in the abandoned office is likewise filler. It is not the headquarters, it's just a lead that turned out to be nothing. Getting rid of that would reduce another mission. Perhaps eliminate the first patrol and have the second one lead to Bertha. For the remainder, Bertha is fine, but I would put the Foreman in Long Tom's mission into her room. Then you can get the part and the info about the three warehouses in the same mission. The rest of the TF could proceed as normal. That would leave it with one defeat all mission and six total missions. Of course, the original could be in Ouroboros. And yes, after running this three times this weekend, it's nearly driven me insane, but I still think folks would enjoy a snappier TF. Reduce the merits accordingly.

I actually wonder more what they would feel the need to do to Knockout Blow.

Tell the truth, if you had a personal aircraft like them would you ever get out of it? 😉

But we like to debate here! 😃

I leveled an EA/EM to 21 last night, it's pretty smooth both solo and in teams with just SOs. A brand new player wouldn't struggle any more with EA than Invulnerability or Shield in my opinion. It's a solid set leveling so far, and I know it's going to be stupid good once built out.

I agree with that so long as the game's challenges and rewards reflect that reality. Which I think CoH does not. That's not the Homecoming staff's fault, it's baked into the original game. This game rewards defeating large numbers of NPCs as quickly as possible more than just about any other activity. The exceptions I can think of are notable, things like Incarnate trials, Hami raids, etc. An easy example can illustrate this. Let's say you have a kill all enemies mission with a very strong Elite Boss at the end. The AoE set will finish quicker and probably by a lot. The ST focuses set gets a benefit on maybe 5% of the mission's objective, i.e. killing the Elite boss. Even if it's a kill Boss and minions objective, it's often better to be AoE because the disparity shows up very quickly. And I don't think there's any content in the game that rewards the ST focused set in a similar fashion. Even if you have a mission where you have to defeat just one enemy, the disparity in time will be negligible most times. For example, my AoE focused Tankers can kill Trapdoor, Hero 1 and the Minotaur in the Mender Ramiel arc at nearly the same rate as my ST focused Stalkers. While at the same time, other parts of that arc (i.e. the Rikti portals) are very quick for the Tankers to clear. I say all that to note that there are some minimum standards that need to be in place to avoid the large disparities you mention.

Don't get me wrong, Power Armor is definitely better and by a lot for Tanking. I do see why they didn't go the mutually exclusive route since for the unwary, taking the stealth power over Power Armor is a suboptimal choice. Hell, I'm not sure I would take it on the Tanker over Power Armor since I wanted Superspeed anyway. As for the comparison to Shield, I likewise can see that comparison. It feels more like Invulnerability to me because of Energize. A set with multiple layers of mitigation with a heal on top is generally my preferred set up and really makes the set a good generalist.

While I agree wholeheartedly regarding the loss of Energy Cloak, I don't think that the Tanker version was nerfed or that it's weaker than SR. SR is a one-trick pony, focused purely on positional defense. It's the best at it, hitting the normal softcap with SOs. That's nice. EA is a layered defense set where you get good defense, decent resists and a heal. It also get the utility of Energy Drain. That works better for my playstyle. With reasonable to obtain IO sets, you're looking at an easy road to the softcap in everything but Psi/Toxic. Alongside 30%+ resists to Sm, Le from just the set. On beta with a hastily put together build, I was in the 70% Sm, Le, Energy resists along with being at the softcap for those three. EA really feels to me to be like Invulnerability, but reversing the emphasis on resists with defense. I do wish it still had Energy Cloak though.

So with the most recent patch, I took the Tanker out on the same mission again. This time I finished at 14:57. This reduced the difference from it taking 37% longer to 25% longer. Please note, that I don't think my Tanker is optimized even if it has good sets. I literally just slapped it together quickly. So I think with some tinkering I could reduce both the Brute and Tanker numbers. But in general, I think it's in a good place. Tankers on teams will be able to add to the AoE damage while keeping aggro and leave the killing to the ATs whose job that is. Nerfs suck, but Tankers on live really feel too much like an obvious choice in most situations. They're still good on Beta, they just don't seem like the unqualified right answer for melee ATs any longer to me.

In the interest of science, I did the Trapdoor mission at +1/x8 with a: Axe/Regen Brute Regen/Axe Tanker Identical slotting in both builds for the primary/secondary except I had the appropriate AT sets for each. The Brute had Tough but otherwise, their pool selections were very similar. I did the Tanker first. It was honestly a bit harder than the Brute, it was clearly slower. Early in the spawn things went well but it really slowed down as the targets died down. For the Brute it was much more consistent. While I might have been hitting less targets, I think I was doing signficantly more damage. My final times were: Brute 11:55 Tanker 16.21 So it took roughly 37% longer. I did the Tanker first, and probably played a bit worse, since this was my first use of this combo. To be honest, I'm not sure that's a reasonable difference. I can't test that particular combo on live, so I'm sure how it would do.

A no-FX temporary power would provide a different way of flying that is slower than any current form of Flight (e.g. Mystic Flight/Fly) like the current jet pack and prestige (carpet, void, rocket board) do. I don't disagree with anything you said, I just don't see how it's responsive to the question of creating another temp power to go along with the 6 or so temporary flight powers we already have.

Agreed, which is why I'm suggesting creating a different temp power. So for example, there's the cheapo 5K jetpack which doesn't look as fancy as some of the other jetpacks which cost 50K per charge. In this case, I'm suggesting creating a different temp power, that has no effects at all. There might be tradeoffs that come along with that (e.g. 100K cost). I appreciate the comment.

I agree that is annoying. Ultimately for me, I just think where there are slower permanent options to increase run speed without fx, there shouldn't be any concern with allowing a similar option for flight (and jumping/teleport even). This is especially so considering that you can basically use jet pack to have fly basically permanently. The original reason I wanted this was that I sometimes play mages who would prefer to be able to use something akin to a "scroll of fly" rather than slap on a jetpack. Pure RP here. As it stands, I just ignore the visual of the jet pack.

I agree that's probably why they never have done it. I kind of think that we have so many other temp and prestige flying option, this one wouldn't cause that many problems. I mean we even get a semi-running equivalent (athletic run) for free as a permanent power. BTW, I know that Athletic Run is not as good as Superspeed.

Resilience is the best resist passive in the game. Especially on a tank, having a base 20% resist to all is just outstanding. I created two Resist Tankers and trivially capped Sm, Le and got to 40-60% in every other resists. Just amazing. The debuff resistances solidified that building for resists is the way to go here. Tanks can probably get a decent amount of defense as well, on both of my builds I was in the 20% range for the positional defenses without trying. I would agree that all four passives are needed, but I don't think any are lackluster. The benefits they give for a power slot are worthwhile IMO.

Basically, I'm just looking for a jet pack temp power to be added to the START vendors that doesn't have a jet pack animation. Just a temporary fly power with default minimum fx.

While I like Tanker Energy Aura, I would second this remark. The in-set stealth powers are fun and provide good utility. I really don't understand why Sentinels didn't get it though.

That's a great workaround, thanks.

When Regen was proliferated to Brutes, Integration was made the Taunt Aura because there wasn't any other toggles to put it in. It's not typically the status protection power. It's usually a power with a damage aura, scaling effect, etc. With the set now having such a power again, could the Taunt effect please move to Reactive Regeneration for Tankers. I would wish this for Brutes as well honestly, but since folks have the choice to take Instant Healing, I can see why we wouldn't want to make that choice even an worse idea. The reason I prefer to have it there is that sometimes when I want to stealth/speed through missions I would like to be able to turn off my taunt aura. Even though it's supposed to suppress under stealth, it doesn't always. Speed Phase handles that for Super Speed stealth, but other forms of stealth aren't as consistent.

I like Mask Presence on Scrappers. I wouldn't care if it were a choice between them, but I like the power being there.

So I've played this for a little while. It's just as good as I thought it would be on Tankers. Did EA/EM because I don't think EM adds anything to survivability over other sets. All Tanker sets allow you to get to stupid defenses and EA is no exception. This set makes this VERY easy. Before I knew it I had Incarnate soft-capped defenses to most damage types and high resistances. By the 40s, was 90% smashing lethal resists and 50-60% on the others. On a "defense" set. EA is just a very good set and very good on Tankers. Not sure that the nerf to the other ATs is warranted, but it's irrelevant for Tankers. One slightly negative feedback would be that Overload is pretty skippable after finishing your build, but it's a nice option that doesn't need to be slotted before that. I don't see anything else to test. It all works, works well and is fun. Good job.

So I've played with the set on a Scrapper and it's very, very mid. It's fine. I intend to level one of these because the set looks very nice, but I don't see myself playing it long term. It seems to take a heavy investment to get to the same place as other sets. My concerns with the set are: First, the lowered lethal resists just seem to be random and don't make any sense. I know you want there to be some differences but this is just a weakness for there to be a weakness. You can build it out of existence, but that limits the set in ways that don't seem justified. Devour Psyche being a cone is again, fine, but if you're looking to make a distinction between Tankers/Brutes and Scrappers/Stalkers why not make it a ST that scales off the rank of the NPCs. So it's more effective if used against AVs, and proportionally lower against Bosses, Lts. and minions. The adaptive recharge could go or be based on the rank as well. It feels like a heavy end set but that's more because I really feel the need to take Tough/Weave to get the resists and defenses in a good place.

While I can be quite irritating, it’s never on purpose. I just didn’t understand what you were concerned about because that line was there. Whether it was there when you first read it, I’ll take you at your word that it wasn’t.

I'm confused, they seem to say this quite directly. Self damage buff lowered from 1.0x to 0.875x. -Res modifiers lowered to match other melee ATs. Diminishing returns: In powers that had their target cap increased from 10 to 16, each target above 10 will take 25% less damage than the previous target In powers that had their target cap increased from 5 to 10, each target above 5 will take 44% less damage than the previous target Gauntlet is immune to these diminishing returns Removed passive global Arc/Radius buff Increased the radius and range of all tanker Primary and Secondary Cones by 50% Cones no longer have their arc boosted Increased the radius of all tanker Primary and Secondary Sphere AoEs by 50% The increase wont push radius above 15ft