ZemX

Anybody has the inf for them. Merits from soloing story arcs can self-fund SOs from 1 to 27 at least, which is as far as I've taken any of them before switching to IOs.

Mission-wise, it's no different from blueside in terms of how much fun the missions are to actually work through. So I figure for most people it's the latter complaint they don't like. But... I kind of feel like people are missing an essential part of getting into redside there. You SHOULD start at the bottom. For real, you WOULD start at the bottom of whatever pecking order exists and work your way up from there. That means making a name for yourself running someone else's schemes. It was much more a problem later where it seemed, as you leveled up, you were only trading one boss for another more powerful boss rather than becoming one yourself. But there was only so much that could ever be done within the framework of this game. The whole system is based on "Something happened! Go react to it!" model which fits heroes more than it fits villains. The best they can do here is make contacts seem like people who are just helping you set up schemes of your own (which they did eventually in some later story arcs). You still can't, as the player, have complete freedom to develop those schemes without a whole ton of new game mechanics added.

I'm convinced a large part of the "drab and unappealing" complaint is literally the weather. It's ALWAYS overcast. Sunlight, even virtual sunlight, has a large affect on a person's mood. I think it was a mistake. There was certainly an attempt here to underscore the "City of Villains" as being where the bad folks lived by having the weather be as oppressive as Recluse's rule. But in reality there would be sunlit days in Cap Au Diable and St. Martial just as there are in Steel Canyon or Skyway City. Grandville, sure, should probably always look like an industrialist hellscape where the poor and diseased live in a literal gutter, but not every zone redside needed to look like that. As with a lot of things, they eventually got it right in Praetoria, which didn't need to look like Grandville to be just as unjust and oppressive. You get these beautifully clean city zones but you still have alleys filled with gang members, protesters demonstrating against the government, and billboards of propaganda exhorting you to report your neighbor if they seem suspicious complete with monstrous caricatures of Resistance members.

I love how you admitted this is because you put people who disagree with your anti-redside opinions on ignore. It's not the sort of thing I'd be proud of, personally.

Yeah, that's why I asked. It looks kind of messy. You'd have to look at each primary attack since the last AS and figure the individual chance each one adds a stack of AF (stacking chance times hit probability). From that you'd have to figure the odds of zero stacks, the odds of one stack, the odds of two stacks, and the odds of three stacks. The total would be 100% but you'd multiply each probability by the damage it would do (where I'd just multiply crit chance times damage). Which is why I'm curious, but not that curious because as @Omega-202 pointed out, leaving out just one AS in a chain of six kills the advantage of waiting. My intuition is that just hitting that whenever it's up is probably better. It's still the highest ST DPA of any attack a Stalker has, right?

Have you worked out the DPS of that plan vs. just using AS whenever it is the highest DPA attack ready to fire, regardless of stacks, as you would for any other chain? I haven't. Just curious if anyone has.

For Long Range Teleporter, you just need to grab an exploration badge from inside Pocket D. I think what you're talking about might be a separate thing that ALSO teleports you to Pocket D. If it's still in the game. Useful if you want to get there and LRT is on cooldown.

City of Data Whirlpool hits 16. Ice Storm and Blizzard both hit 10.

You're probably talking about something on the order of an extra 3-6 endurance per fight there. If you really are running directly from one fight to the next, there's not a lot of seconds to shave just by boosting your run-speed 33%. It's a tenth of his recovery. That's not nothing, as I said. But it's not bottoming his blue bar in the span of just a couple fights all on its own either. He didn't actually say, but I am assuming it wasn't as gradual as "I can only go 8 or 10 continuous fighting spawns without taking a knee." If it was, then sure... it could be the straw that broke the camel's back, as they say. Note I am not saying don't turn it off. Absolutely turn it off... just that it's unlikely to solve the problem. It will extend, a little bit, the time before you bottom out completely.

Nah, lots of games do that. Skyrim has magic for it (or just Vampirism). Fallout 4 has a perk for it. Tomb Raider has a rebreather. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has a magic (or first civ tech, if you prefer) enhancement for weapons that does it. When I play AC:Odyssey these days, one of my first stops once out in the open waters of the rest of the map is that little island where you can sneak Poseidon's Trident away from a chest guarded by high-level lions. 🤪 But outside any other means of underwater breathing, I still think it's more common for video games to underrepresent the ability of a person to hold their breath underwater just as a means of making it more of a gameplay obstacle than it really would be.

Sprinting, holding one's breath, and... oddly enough... flashlights (also torches). Video game light sources are notoriously temporary. Much more-so than in real life. I get the desire to make them a limited resource but it's out of all proportion to reality. Forget Lithium Ion batteries. Even an old D-Cell flashlight would last longer than 30 seconds. This one I think most modern video games have finally gotten past but it was heavily featured in such high profile games as Doom 3 and Halo, to name just two. There'd always be some noticeable duration bar that would pop up and drain whenever you turned on a personal light source. Skyrim was a little better but (unmodded) you could only hold a torch for 4 minutes before it would burn out. A real torch would last at least an hour, if not two. Sprinting? I am replaying Mass Effect again because of the remake and even though they've allowed Commander Shepard to sprint outside of combat now, he/she still only makes it about twenty feet or so before gasping for air. I mean Shep is in active-military shape and has been genetically enhanced (presumably for strength and endurance). At least the first two games have this problem. They might have finally gotten rid of it by 3. I don't remember. And yeah, swimming underwater. This one is a mixed bag. Some games feature breath holding I'd have trouble keeping up with but I'd say more often than not I can hold my breath much longer than a typical video game character's "breath bar" will last. But on the flip side, video games have their share of superhuman feats performed by ordinary people as well. Snarky mentioned one: unnatural ability to take a beating that should kill someone. Another is exemplified by just about any game featuring climbing. Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, etc. Granted, the Assassins in AC are supposed to be at least a little superhuman, but they still climb with unnatural speed and manage to grab ledges from a fall that should rip their arms off. If you've watched a real free climb up a rock face, it's impressive... but really slow compared to a video game. And that two-story fall? It didn't hurt because I... rolled out of the landing! Yeah... that works.

Welcome back! On the subject of bankrolling your alts though, you should do some searching on these forums for advice on building wealth. These days, there are likely faster ways than farming that particular mission. A 50 can run Task Forces for the reward merits (particularly the Weekly Strike Targets once each for double merits) and turn those merits into inf in several ways. Easiest is to buy enhancement converters with the merits and then sell the converters on the auction house (/ah). You can make about 65-67K inf per converter. You get 3 from each merit. So 5 merits is about a million inf. Another more time consuming way is to use the converters to convert less valuable IOs into more valuable IOs and then sell those. But if you prefer just grinding through enemies, you can usually find someone (or start one yourself) running a "kill most" ITF. In addition to the merit rewards for the task force itself, you chew through so many enemies in this one with a good team that you come away with plenty of inf at level 50 just from all those defeats. Also, don't forget to make yourself an SG base if you aren't already part of an SG. Building one is free on Homecoming. It's handy having all the teleporters, work tables, and storage bins. Add your alts with /altinvite name. When you come across or craft useful IOs for your alts you can drop them in the enhancement bins here. Same for rare salvage.

If you were noticeably struggling with end, shutting off Sprint will make minimal difference. Every bit helps, but we're talking about 0.29 end/sec here. Based on the procs you've mentioned, your recovery should be sitting at around 3 end/sec. So running Sprint was eating about a tenth of your recovery. Any other toggles you had, assuming a little end slotting, were eating up another 2-3 tenths. Everything else is your attacks, which each typically consume around 0.8 to 1.0 end/sec if used every time they are recharged. I mean it's not nothing. Turning it off is like adding another Perf Shifter +end proc to your build. But it's the sort of thing that will slowly eat your end bar over the course of several fights. If you're chomping blues in every fight, or every other fight... you need more endrdx in attacks. Or less recharge.

The +1 level shift from the Alpha applies in all content as long as you are level 45 or above (e.g. You can exemplar to run a level 45 mission team and will be effectively level 46). The +1 shifts in Lore and Destiny are "Incarnate" shifts and apply only in Incarnate content. Aside from that, the passive benefits of Alpha and Interface slots are very significant. Just not as flash as a Judgement nuke.

PuGs are the only reason I play this game. Endless variety. I'd get bored of a competent, regular, team I think. And truth be told most PuGs work. It's that they end up working differently often enough that it's interesting.

I still do that sometimes at 50 on teams. It depends on the team. If there's abundant AoE and I'm seeing bosses left standing, I switch to boss-killing mode instead of opening with an AoE from Hide. So I may leave a little early to set up a hidden AS. It's still worth doing if you can get just slightly ahead of the team. But yeah it sometimes mean I get followed and that person ends up taking the alpha while I set up an Assassin Strike. They usually only do it once though. 😀

This is always good advice for anyone stealthing to begin with, because not everyone is a fan of that. But it's particularly a good idea if you've been tanking for the team. I see this all the time when two or three people who CAN stealth go charging off leaving the rest who can't at the door. They don't much care to wait around waiting for the mission to complete when there are fields of XP in front of them so.... they start face-planting because they didn't realize how much they were relying on those people who charged off to help handle the x8 spawns. Not all the time... but often enough to notice. It's a little ironic because I'm usually on a Stalker and more and more lately I am just sticking with the team to help tank while a tanker charges off to stealth. 🤪 I love this game!

I'm pretty sure some joker covered that in like... the first post or something. Whoever that guy was. It was so very long ago, Snarky.

Good news! That's completely wrong! People can stop worrying about Blasters vs. Sentinels because it's Tankers vs. Sentinels. Here's what we've established so far in this thread about Sentinels and Tankers: Tankers: - Do more damage - Are way tougher - Can control aggro with taunt - Hit way more targets with their AoEs. Sentinels: - *checks notes*... umm... Blasting is "fun". Yeah, that's all I've got.

Isn't that what I said in the very next sentence? And yes, it's rhetorical. I know they are already at or below Tanker damage. Frankly, Tankers shouldn't be doing Tanker damage, but that's a whole other flame-war as I'm sure you know. 🤪

Are you seriously suggesting Sentinels are effectively less at risk of dying on a team than Tankers are? Because I really doubt that. The entire reason Tankers (and Brutes) have so much more durability is to compensate for the greater risk they can put themselves in. They wouldn't be able to tank at all if that weren't true. On top of that, why would you even play a Sentinel if Tankers could both outdamage them AND survive more aggro, all the while performing a usually valuable team role of controlling aggro? Aesthetics would be the only reason and it's one cited often by Sentinel players in threads like this. It's not an invalid reason... but it's not balance either.

I should think so.

Scourge effectively multiplies Corruptor damage by 1.25 if averaged over a long enough period of time.

No, I think it's 500 percent. The wikis don't appear to have been updated to include Sentinels on the Limits article. City of Data lists "StrMax" for all damage types as 5.0 on Sentinel. Same as Corruptors, Blasters, Stalkers, and Scrappers. Brutes are 7.0. So I am pretty sure I'm looking at the damage enhancement cap there.

Who said they were? Certainly, I didn't. So what's to laugh at about comparing Sentinels to the two closest ATs in the game to... Sentinels? Seems to me if you're balancing ATs, you look at similar ATs and try to fit them all in the spectrum somewhere. Sentinels being roughly as sturdy as a Stalker but able to fight at range suggests to me they should do as much damage as Stalkers. Ditto for Scrappers. That's not to say they do enough damage already. It's saying they shouldn't be boosted beyond Scrappers or Stalkers because... what would justify that?