TheMoncrief
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Posts posted by TheMoncrief
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14 minutes ago, Hyperstrike said:
Tanks, currently, do not have access to SR.
Come again?
Somebody probably out to tell the Homecoming character creator about that. Mine doesn't seem to have got the message.
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Well, I busted out my extremely rusty computerese skills, and came up with this. All on a level 50 Brute with all Fighting attacks taken, and assuming that I'm understanding DPA calculations as the game does them, and assuming that the synergy changes base damage instead of applying a 15% damage enhancement to the power (that last one is a big assumption):
Boxing: 41.207 damage, 1.067 animation time, 38.620 DPA
Kick: 45.544 damage, 1.833 animation time, 24.847 DPA
Cross Punch: 68.860 damage, 1.67 animation time, 41.233 DPA
Jab: 28.3612 damage, 1.067 animation time, 26.580 DPA
Punch: 41.7077 damage, 1.2 animation time, 34.756 DPA
Haymaker: 68.4066 damage, 1.5 animation time, 45.600 DPA
So the fighting pools look pretty decent compared to the first 3 attacks in Super Strength. Not definitively better, but decent. For most Brute builds, you have to take one of the Fighting pool attacks anyway, so you may as well use it. The secondary effects from the synergy I'm not considering, just purely on a damage output basis. This all depends on taking *ALL* of them, though. If you're only taking one of the Fighting attacks, even Jab is comparable, and Punch and Haymaker both outshine it.
It also depends on my assumption that the synergy effect is part of the base damage of the attack. If it's just an enhancement, they're still trash, at least on a Brute.
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I've really wanted to know just how the damage bonus from Fighting synergy works. I tried reading City of Data, and it's... opaque. Maybe my reading comprehension has gone the way of my hair as I get older, I dunno. I'd really love to know whether they are actually worth taking and using over, say, Super Strength's forgettable 6 powers (ie, everything except Knockout Punch, Rage, and Foot Stomp). It's not even clear to me if that bonus 15% damage is an increase to their base damage or a buff, which makes a substantial difference when you are (as I am) considering them on a Brute.
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As long as it's not a universal "Your secondary will just be disabled in all future content, choose a better set scrub!" problem I'll stick with it. I have a concept and Willpower fits better than anything else, so I'll cope. Hiding behind corners does help. As does having another contact providing missions that aren't complete nightmares when I need a break.
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OK, I have a War Mace/Willpower Scrapper who's been running into some massive problems starting at level 40. I went into Tina MacIntyre's story arc and immediately get bodied by the Praetorian Clockwork. It's like they are custom made just to utterly wreck Willpower, with massive regen and defense debuffs. I can beat the missions at low difficulty, but I'm a *SCRAPPER*, I'm usually running at, well, not low difficulty.
Is this what playing Willpower is going to look from now on, facing massive debuffs that make most of my secondary set pointless or at best massively dependent on inspirations or locked into difficulty settings that make more sense for a poorly built Blaster? Or are Praetorian Clockwork just the exception, my personal kryptonite, and I'll not be facing many enemies so perfectly designed to hard-counter me in the future?
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On 3/29/2024 at 4:34 PM, Two5boy said:
Thank you very much for your comprehensive explanation of the difference of the two. Really insightful and I think you are spot on. I feel that Necro plays a lot better overall and you can tell the update is well thought out and has really rounded them out.
Demons have more AOE and can finish large mobs quicker but definitely not as safe. On missions with difficult mobs with two bosses or more I faceplant more often.
I hope demons get looked at for next update.
Agreed. Demons don't need *MUCH*, but they do need some attention. Thugs and Beasts are both well below Demons I'd say, but all 3 sets that weren't touched in the most recent set of MM overhauls could use at least touch ups.
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10 hours ago, ZemX said:
https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Default_Key_Bindings
As for future updates, I imagine they will happen the same way this happened, assuming anyone expects the defaults to change any further, which seems unlikely.
The article you linked was probably gained by dumping the default binds. Which is no longer possible.
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Since the Battle Axe rework, I've been looking for a character concept to use it with, and run into a problem. How am I supposed to do a lumberjack character waging his solitary crusade against the Devouring Earth tree monsters that slaughtered his family without a plaid shirt costume option?
Please, can this be in the game?
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Just now, Frozen Burn said:
MM Henches are not just "pets" - they are the MM's primary attack and defense, and their entire/sole reason for being. So, naturally, the ATO procs benefit the Henches and thusly, they benefit the MM. The MM is unique in this way to all other ATs. And MMs should have the same opportunity as all other ATs to slot their ATOs in more than just 3-4 powers whereas all other ATs have the freedom to slot theirs in 7-8 powers.
To be fair, some control sets have very few actual control powers. I think Illusion Control only has 4. That's still more than some Mastermind primaries have powers to slot their ATO's, and the same number as the best case Mastermind primaries. But 7-8 is not a universal rule for control sets.
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6 hours ago, Rudra said:
The consideration is that the ATOs include pet enhancements. So while they are ArcheType Origin enhancements, they are also pet set enhancements. Hence the limitation.
No they're not. They are Mastermind ATO's. Period. Any other restriction beyond what is expected from an ATO set is arbitrary. Just about the only consistent thing about ATO's is that they must slot into powers specific to that archetype rather than pool powers. Tankers and Defender mostly have to slot their ATO's in their secondaries, for example, because it would be challenging to design ATO's to fit usefully into their highly variable primary power sets.
The argument that having globals that benefit pets means they shouldn't be slottable in personal attacks is silly. They benefit pets because they are Mastermind ATO's, and the Mastermind archetype was designed to focus heavily on pets. That does not mean that their ATO's should be restricted to pets. Have you seriously considered the number of globals out there that can be slotted into powers that do not benefit from the global effects at all and are not even relevant to it? Luck of the Gambler in Tough Hide? Miracle in Health? Power Transfer in Stamina? Kismet in almost any power that will take Kismet? Globals are not always relevant to the powers they slot into. That's why they're globals.
As long as their restriction still requires that they slot into Mastermind powers (which my suggestion guarantees) there is nothing inappropriate about allowing Mastermind ATO's to slot into a slightly broader selection of powers.
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9 hours ago, Rudra said:
Slotting pet set enhancements does not fit into non-pet powers. And though I am not a dev, I'm fairly certain they will not agree to enable power inappropriate sets to be slotted. One possible reason why they wouldn't agree? Because it would establish a precedent of being allowed to slot enhancements into powers where they don't fit.
And I didn't ask to slot pet sets - Pet Damage or Recharge Intensive Pet - into Mastermind primary personal attacks. I asked for Mastermind ATO's. ATO's are slottable, generally, in whatever kind of powers are convenient for the Archetype in question. Notably, Defender ATO's don't slot in their Buff/Debuff sets (mostly), they slot in their attacks. Restricting the Mastermind ATO's to their pet powers is incredibly restrictive, especially for primaries that don't have a fourth pet power.
Are Mastermind primary attacks thematic to Masterminds? Well, every single Mastermind set has three such attacks. Many Mastermind primaries only have three pet powers. The number of personal attacks in a Mastermind primary is actually more consistent than the number of pets. And Mastermind ATO's have exactly zero enhancement aspects that do not fit personal attack powers. That is actually fewer than the aspects that do not work for pet powers, since as I mentioned, pets completely ignore recharge reduction from any source, including slotted enhancements.
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One issue that many Masterminds will face is that keeping their henchmen alive requires finding some place to slot the many global IO's that grand defense or resistance to them. Some Mastermind sets have only 3 powers that accept these (Pet Damage and Recharge Intensive Pet) IO's, and those are the henchman powers themselves. This leaves the Mastermind in a bad situation - either give up set bonuses and effective enhancement of your henchmen, or give up the global benefits of the IO's that allow your henchmen to survive in order to be effective. Compounding the issue is that some, but not all Mastermind primaries have a fourth power that takes these sets. This allows these sets to face drastically less slotting pressure for these critical global IO's.
My suggestion is simple - allow the Mastermind ATO's to be slotted in a Mastermind's primary personal attack. That would take two of the global IO's out of competition for the precious slots in the henchman powers and allow some freedom to arrange the remaining global IO's without completely crippling the effectiveness of any of the henchmen. It would also allow Masterminds to actually make use of the Recharge Reduction on the Command of the Mastermind set, which has quite a bit of it - the pets completely ignore this enhancement value, making the ATO significantly less desirable.
Ultimately, this would narrow the gap between the Mastermind sets that have a fourth power that can slot the global IO's and the sets that do not. And also encourage players to actually take and slot up their personal attacks, which are often completely ignored as overpriced and ineffective.
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On 3/9/2024 at 1:04 PM, Sovera said:
Four years later....
And Energy Cloak still lacks a "no transparency" cosmetic option.
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On 3/11/2024 at 3:25 PM, Glacier Peak said:
I appreciate your input and I see this as a bug fix as well. However, I'll point out that in my post at the top that those "overpowered " versions of Sleet you mentioned didn't apply to the Corruptor version, as it has been the same value since Issue 6, which persisted for nearly twenty years before a change was deemed necessary.
That's my issue. It's not a bug fix. Inasmuch as anything is definitive, the Corruptor version of the set is the definitive expression of the original developer intent for the power set. If there was a bug, it was that it was ported without alteration to Defenders.
I don't *LIKE* the change, but I can accept that it was needed. But please call it what it is - a nerf. It is produced not by a programming failure to properly express design intent being fixed, but by a change in design intent. They decided that Cold Domination was too powerful and nerfed it.
Nerfs happen. Players are rarely happy about them. We get over it. But misrepresenting what happened implies that there's nothing to be unhappy about and the players are being whiny cheaters having their broken stuff fixed, rather than players being unhappy about a change in the game that, however necessary, negatively affected their game play experience.
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I've had a long and not particularly happy relationship with Blasters since live release back in the day. My first character was an Energy/Energy Blaster who never made it much past level 20, as the frailty of the AT just meant I had no fun playing. I tried various other builds, like AR/Dev and Fire/Fire, and always bounced, right up until live shut down.
Which is to say, I've tried to play Blasters for a really long time. I could never make myself keep playing one. But I'm stubborn, or perhaps merely a slow learner, so when Homecoming opened up, Blasters were once more on the menu. The first one I made was a Water/Temporal Blaster, and after various struggles, I figured some stuff out, and actually started to have fun. Sometimes, anyway. But today I finally managed to get my Blaster - still only level 39, so not even at the cap much less incarnated out or anything - to feel fun and satisfying to play consistently.
Not sharing a build, it's not anything special, just trying to grab Artillery and Thunderstrike sets so my Ranged Defense is enough to keep me alive while I Hover above and wash my enemies away. But to me it feels worth celebrating that the very first AT I played when CoH first went live and have consistently found unsatisfying until today is actually enjoyable for me.
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On 3/5/2024 at 12:41 AM, Zect said:
The AT is called defender not butler or nanny. That’s all that really needs to be said to them.
I believe the version I saw was "I'm a Defender, not a kindergarten teacher." Possibly prefaced with "D***it Jim!"
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Demons and Thugs are... all right without an update. They're no longer the best sets by a country mile, but they're OK. Beast Mastery was a sub-par set before Mercenaries, Necromancy, and Robotics got updated, and are now by a significant margin the worst MM primary. Not as comparatively bad as Mercenaries used to be, but still the worst.
Demons and Thugs really just need the update to the pet upgrade powers, but Beast Mastery kind of needs a more thorough update.
Edit: And apparently Ninjas need a downgrade, as their stealth is so OP I completely forgot they existed at all. I have no idea how much they might need, but that is pretty scary.
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On the plus side, my last several missions have been outdoor and office maps. My Voltaic Sentinel does a much better job keeping up in those.
I still wish the VS would just leash to me or port near me when I end up leaving it behind. Or just be something purely cosmetic like a Targeting Drone and fire its bolts from where I am. It's a *TOGGLE* that only cosmetically resembles a pet. It shouldn't even be possible for it to get lost or stuck.
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On 2/26/2024 at 9:14 AM, WumpusRat said:
Hm. Could have sworn the drones triggered procs. I might be thinking of another power though, it's been quite a while since I played any of my /traps builds. Just popped onto my bot/traps to check though, and you're right.
And if you're really trying to squeeze a couple extra points of defense out, then sure, though it's not really necessary depending on your build. And with bots/trap not having any extra pet power to stick the auras in, if you want all 6 you're only working with 4 slots per pet. Adding a +def IO into the prot bots means they're going to be at 3 slots, which is going to seriously cut into their damage output, accuracy, and end management.
With my build, between the prot bot shields, scorpion shield, FFG, maneuvers, CJ, weave, and various IO/set bonuses my bot/trap MM is sitting at around 55% ranged/melee/aoe def, 75% smash/lethal def, 67% energy def. Toxic/psionic def are her weaknesses, but not many things are PURELY psi/toxic attack without having a ranged/melee/aoe component as well. The bots are at 43% range/melee and 57% aoe def. So not quite soft-capped, but even losing some bots to incarnate stuff I have enough personal def to get them back up and into the fight without getting shredded.
I kind of built her to be extremely durable though, so YMMV depending on builds. 🙂
My experience was that the Protector Bots do laughable damage, and I mostly only want them for the bubbles and repair beams. The repair beams, I'm fairly sure, get upgraded with one of the pet upgrade powers, which just leaves the bubbles to bother enhancing. I otherwise mule several pet aura IO's in them, with I think a single 3 piece set bonus from one of the aura IO's. The lion's share of the damage output from the set comes from the Assault Bot anyway, and the Battle Drones do the clean up well enough by virtue of there being 3 of them. So those are the pets I bother enhancing for combat effectiveness in the form of damage dealing.
Also, I think MM ATO's should be slotable in MM primary attacks as well as MM primary pet powers. That would free up some room for more useful enhancement of the henchman pets in sets that don't have something like Hell on Earth of Gang War to slot pet IO's for auras. I'm sure there's a reason it wouldn't work, but as a suggestion, I don't think it has a major downside.
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36 minutes ago, Wolfboy1 said:
Also, i have only ever received one purple recipe in my 8+ years of playing. RNG is my bane and I want to murder it with every fiber of my being.
OK, that is horrifyingly bad RNG. You have my sympathy.
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I'm in a mission sequence with a lot of natural caves. Not the smooth Snake caves, the jagged ones with the enormous rooms and the narrow, twisty tunnels connecting them. So I'm definitely noticing the pathing issues more than I have in other map types - but it really is constant in those missions. And it is absolutely worse pathfinding than anything else I've seen in City of Heroes. Maybe the pathfinding isn't worse, but the tendency to get stuck permanently on a jagged bit of cave wall or a railing or whatever.
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Is it just me, or does the Voltaic Sentinel from Electrical Blast have abusively bad pathing? Like, I play Masterminds and Controllers fairly regularly. I'm used to pets being kind of dumb, but the Voltaic Sentinel takes it to the next level. It will get hung up on some piece of landscape geometry and just stop there. Forever. Still costing me endurance, of course, and not showing up on the map so I can't easily figure out where I would need to go to pick it up again.
Even civilian escort targets keep up with me better than the Voltaic Sentinel!
Do other Electrical Blast users just skip this power, or cancel the toggle and summon a new one every time the old one gets lost, or what? Also, how does Electrical Blast stack up without Voltaic Sentinel's damage contribution?
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Expectations.
Bad PUG experiences are inevitable. Not everybody will be as good as you. Not everybody will be motivated by the same things as you. And even if they were, you'd still feel like you were the only one actually playing the way you expect, because you only have insight into one person's reality - your own. There is not and can not be any guarantee that your PUG experience will be good. In fact, there is pretty much a guarantee that at least some of them will be bad. That's what happens when you are dealing with other people.
The other players are not there to make your PUG experience good. They are there to make their own PUG experiences good - and many of them will want significantly different things out of those PUG experiences than you do. Others will want the same things, but bring different skill sets to the PUG than you bring. Enjoy the good and tolerate the bad. It's all you can do.
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I feel like SR is much better on a Brute or Tanker, where the health pool is big enough that the scaling resists kick in while you still have enough health to take a hit or two. On a Stalker, Sentinel, or Scrapper, with their lower health pools, better to have healing and endurance clicks than scaling resists that will move you from "about to die," to "still about to die."
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Fiery Melee?
in Brute
Posted
Every time I look at Fiery Melee on any AT except Tanker, I get sad. I understand that Cremate is not a bad power, but it's not the Combustion that I know and love. And with a reasonable amount of recharge, Tanker Fiery Melee has perfectly respectable ST damage. Then again, Brute Fiery melee also has perfectly respectable AoE damage, it's just not as good as the Tanker version because of the Gauntlet buff *AND* Combustion. It's not that Brute Fiery Melee is bad, until you compare it to the absolute gem that is Tanker Fiery Melee.
I do wish there were options to graphically reskin all (or at last most) of the attacks to either all use Fire Swords, or none use Fire Swords.