ZemX

12 doesn't buy you anything vs. the new critical KB feature the Council have. You would need 16. I don't even bother with that on my Rad Tankers that have 10 built-in. And I'm not getting tossed around that much even despite having little to no defense. Critical KB is only a 5% chance on certain powers. It'll happen if you're tanking a whole spawn, but it's not going to be "beach ball" action by any stretch of the imagination. At least that has not been my experience with it on Rad.

I don't know if you want to change anything. What they did is give certain Council a "critical" KB chance. Doesn't seem to happen that often but when it does, it seemed to be accompanied by a "FREEM!" message and it was enough to knock back my Rad tankers with their built-in KB protection. For example, per COD, the Council's rocket folks have a Rocket Launch ability that normally does Mag 1.2 KB. But it has a 5% chance of mag +14 KB. There is no point trying to build for that on a toon with no KB protection.

Well.. only one of us always plays with @Snarky on his team! 😈 But to be serious, I also don't run into problems with this all that often either. These are the same PuGs that botch the City Hall Steps in Posi 1. The difference is they are likely waaaay stronger for Sutter than they are for Posi. Unless the team is poorly built and/or running +3/+4, they can pretty much stumble into that portal room, ignore the comps, and still succeed. That said, I have some stories. I was once on a Sutter that went so bad, everyone but my stalker and a corruptor quit on the last fight. Then we completed it. *flex*

Adaptation is the only one that affects the others directly. That said, there aren't really any stinkers in the whole set. They're all pretty desirable. If I had to skip one, I might skip the damage aura. Wouldn't particularly want to even if I didn't care for the damage because it also does a bit of -dmg debuff. But if I felt like my survivability was good and wanted room to take, say, an epic ranged AoE... I'd consider it.

I've actually never bothered to find out what, if anything, shutting down the fuel lines accomplishes. Is it just optional objective XP award? Does it change something in the portal room fight? No idea.

It takes around 1 second before the effect lands. The effect being the creation of the Earthquake pseudopet. At that point, it begins ticking 5 times per second a 7% chance to knock down the enemy. So it's not unexpected they could stand there a couple seconds before the KB chance knocks them down.

If this is how it works, then worth noting not all AS are equal in terms of the animation time after the interrupt period. They're not wildly different but I can see it being the difference in something like this. So it could depend if you're on a faster animating AS set or a slower one.

If you've done it on Brute then I'd say Tanker will probably feel too similar. You'll be tougher and your AoEs will have a bit more reach, but that's it. Stalker would be my suggestion, but keep in mind you lose Whirling Sword to gain Assassin Strike. Basically, Broadsword will perform better against single targets on a Stalker and better against crowds on a Scrapper. Shield is good on either since both ATs tend to fare better with defense-based armors than with anything else. It's a little weird on Stalkers in that Grant Cover actually adds some stealth to allies within 15 feet of you. Keep that in mind on hostage missions. Though it is nice to help cloak the team when you enter a mission and there's a group near the door. Overall, the way Stalkers and Stalker ATOs work will be a much different experience than the Brute. You might enjoy it.

Depends when you start the clock. When I am playing a Stalker, I consider that clock is only running while the fight is happening. Someone else who is more focused on total map clear time may have a different perspective, but to me at least, if that's what I care about.... I'll play a Scrapper. What I like about Stalkers is deleting dangerous enemies fast. It's what the AT is designed for. So my clock starts when AS lands, not when it begins. Scale 7 damage and a nice AoE debuff... in zero seconds. But like I said, depends what you value in your gameplay. When I play a Stalker, even on a team, I consider my value is boss killing or dealing with otherwise dangerous or troublesome foes, instantly. Or as fast as possible anyway. I am not looking to maximize my total average damage output over a whole mission. If I am dropping bosses around the same time the rest of the team is annihilating everything else with an AoE barrage? Job done. Hence I will skip to the next spawn early if there's nothing worthy of my attention in the mop-up phase of the previous fight so I have plenty of time to select a target and set up to time the AS landing right at the time the team arrives. I am not there for sustained DPS. I am a specialist. Just sucks when that AS misses in full view of the team is all. 🤪

No misunderstanding. With an 8 second recharge and 1.87s cast time you can cast this roughly every 9.87 seconds. In other words, you can cast this about six times per minute. At a 57% proc chance that translates to an expectation of... about 3.5 procs per minute. Depends on the proc. Damage procs are easy to evaluate. Just multiply their damage by the proc chance and compare that to the damage you'd get from slotting another damage enhancer instead. Less obvious are things like hold or debuff procs. Some people favor more reliability than long-term average benefit and hence only bother with procs on long recharge powers where they can max the proc chance.

It's the worst on a team. Like I will try to leave just a few seconds early so I can find the next spawn's boss, line him up, and get into the power-crouch before the rest of the team arrives to nuke everything. And then whiffff.... just as the rest of team is arriving to witness. "Uhh...nobody saw that, riiiight?"

A b-list villain from the best b-list villain group around, "Rogue Isle Villains". https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Blood_Thorn

This has to be some AI driven nonsense. I love how it just slaps an image next to each of these that sometimes has nothing to do with City of Heroes. Devouring Earth? Picture of Earth! Council? Here's an image of a bunch of people sitting in front of a table. Poilce? Yeah here's a stock photo of a cop. Interestingly, when I do this same search it actually says "Las Vegas Raiders" but if you click to expand that part of the list, at least some of the links are legitimately about "Sky Raiders"

I really feel like an old man when I see anybody complain about AT balance these days. Like I'm on my rocking chair on the porch telling them how we early Stalkers trudged uphill both ways in the snow to our missions through 16 whole issues before they finally addressed Stalker balance! AND WE LIKED IT! (no we didn't).

Yep... psychology. 🤪 You probably aren't actually missing more with AS. You just notice it more because it's more of a big deal moment and when you miss and the enemy doesn't even notice? It almost seems like an insult. AS has inherently high accuracy (1.2x) to begin with and you're enhancing it a further 58%. Hitting a +2 enemy is 56% base chance. .56 x 1.2 x 1.58 is greater than 1... so you should be hitting capped 95% chance toHit unless the enemy has high defense or something. If you want to be sure, go to the Combat window and start monitoring "Base->Last Hit Chance" . This way the window will always show your most recent attack's chance to hit. It should show 95% in this case. I think we've all noticed the same thing, but there's no hidden mechanic here. Just good old human brain mechanics. 😈

Probably what throws you looking at them walking around is that the actual enemy mobs never walk. They always hover.

Hologram costume of a Rulaaru Wisp?

Are you sure you're not just hearing left/right stereo? Because without the 3D Sound option enabled, I think CoH just does a stereo sound mix. You might be expanding that to 5.1 or 7.1 in sound settings but it's still only playing sounds from generally the left and right as that's all the game is sending. The way to tell is find a sound you are sure is coming from some object in the environment. A torch on the wall in Oranbega should do it. Or someone standing around with their heal on auto. Close your eyes, spin around, stop, and then see if you can guess whether the sound is in front of you or behind you before opening your eyes to check. If you can't do this perfectly every time, you're probably just hearing stereo. Last time I fiddled around with this I think I decided the game actually sounds better when I switch to 2-speaker setup before launching CoH. Normally I play on headphones with virtual 7.1 surround speaker setup. In most modern games that actually can mix to multi-speaker setups, this does a good enough job of letting me know where a sound is coming from. But in CoH it was acting weird. Some sounds seemed like they were nowhere or inside my head. Other sounds were painfully loud like Ice Swords (still are sort of). Putting it on 2-speaker helped me pick out better which direction sounds were coming from left/right and that was usually good enough for finding glowies.

Some PuGs are quiet. Some are so chatty people are dying because they were busy typing some witty reply in the middle of a fight. On Everlasting, sometimes people run "RP friendly" PuGs. Don't know how much that happens anywhere else. This is code for "It'd be cool if you got into character and had some fun but we won't be sticklers about it. At the very least you need to able to put up with the rest of us play-acting". So it's pretty casual and fun. Still other PuGs are good with banter without having anything to do with roleplaying. I would guess your odds of a chatty group are probably less depending on what type of team it is. On a speed Task Force or PI radio team, it tends to be mostly all grinding away or rushing around. Not so much chatting. More common to get a good chatty team on mission arcs or tips, I'd say.

This. People can do whatever they want and that includes them triple-boxing and me quitting their team when I find out they are triple-boxing. I don't care how good they are juggling three windows. That's not three teammates. That said. I'd say it's pretty rare I've run into that on random PuGs. Most people multi-boxing are doing it in farms, I'd guess. And there it makes all kinds of sense.

It's a shame the "3D sound" option doesn't work anymore. It was even better when you could actually tell which directions sounds were coming from.

No, listen we haven't repeated all the same arguments from the last thread yet. We need a few more pages!!

No, I'm good thanks. I'll continue to say what I believe and if you've got anything more than "I'm right because I say so and everyone believes me! (believe me they do!)" then do please let me know. I was quoting what was actually said and if you'd bothered not to just snip part of my post and pretend it was the whole thing (though I don't know why I expect anything else here) you'd see I explained BOTH examples of names I'd believe were stolen and ones that could have just been guessed because they were simple. Hell if "Ascendant" weren't reserved in the game now, someone who never knew him would probably have grabbed it because it's a freaking word in the English language folks! There are probably plenty of "Famous" live players who had simple names anyone would guess entirely on their own and then be accused of having stolen them. You have no idea how many names or which names this guy reserved so stop pretending you know anything more about this than I do. You're guessing and so am I. If he wants to pipe up and say he totally copied a bunch of forum folks' names directly he can. But that isn't actually what he said. He said they were desirable names. And that's any simple name. Ask Superman.

I was being honest. Simple, thematic names tend to be the most commonly chosen and hence the hardest to get this far into HC's run. The comic book genre is filled with such names. Most of the iconic heroes (and villains) have them.

If you're referring to the post linked by @PeregrineFalcon earlier in this thread, what it actually says is that they grabbed "a large number of desirable names" and then later got mistaken for "famous" live players. The thing is, "desirable" names are desirable because they are simple and thematic. Maybe you've heard of Superman? Batman? Wonder Woman? If someone grabs "Arcanaville" who isn't actually Arcanaville from the old forums then I'd be suspicious. But as @Troo's post illustrates, I am not surprised if names as simple as Gy, Guy, Gee, and Tru were taken, entirely independently by people who just thought them up on their own. Sorry to say, but I'd think the same of "Frostbiter". I used to have "Fissioneer" on a rad controller on Live but it was gone by the time I joined HC. I never imagined anyone scraped the old forums and found it in my old .sig. It's a simple, radiation-themed, name construction. I wasn't surprised it was taken. I was more surprised by the ones that weren't.