Jump to content

Stormwalker

Members
  • Posts

    303
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Stormwalker

  1. It depends on the attack. If the attack has a positional component, positional defenses will work. If it doesn't, they won't. I don't recall my /SR's ever having problems against Silver Mantis, but it's been quite a while since the last time I fought her on one. As for Staff, it's a fun set, and its AoE is pretty solid, but its single target damage is terrible. I enjoy my (level 46) Staff/WP quite a bit, and she's very, very hard to kill, but she'll never come close to my Claws/SR or my Energy/Energy in the damage output department.
  2. You pretty much said it all right here. My two level 50 scrappers (Claws/SR and Energy/Energy) on HC can run +4/x8 against most villain groups if I want to. The several 50 scrappers (Claws/SR, DM/DA, Katana/Regen, DM/Regen, and I know I'm forgetting some) and the two 50 brutes (EM/Inv and SS/Inv) that I had on Live could do it also. The groups that each character has (or had, in the case of the ones on live) problems with are different, because different powersets and different builds have different weaknesses. And all of those weaknesses can be overcome if you're willing to go to enough trouble to do it. For that matter, the only 50 I have ever had that couldn't solo at +4/x8 was a blaster. And I'm sure if I'd had a better build for her, she could have done it, too, but she was a pure concept character and I generally suck at building blasters anyhow. That said, I usually don't solo at +4/x8, even though I can. Why? Because it's slow and I am just not that patient most of the time. Sometimes I will do it just for the challenge, or to savor the feeling of being able to do it, or to test some tweak to one of my builds... but doing it all the time? Ain't nobody got time for that (except obviously some people do... but those people are not me)!
  3. And if someone wants to play that way - if someone is aware of their options, aware of the tradeoffs they are making in order to play that way, and still chooses to play that way - more power to them. I am not here to tell anyone else how to have fun. I just don't want people to be discouraged from using the AH because they think it is too much work, when the truth is that it is exactly however much work you want to put into it (and your returns are relative to how much work you choose to put into it). I want people to be informed and make informed decisions. Past that, I don't care how they have their fun, as long as their fun isn't harming other players or the game as a whole.
  4. I mean, I don't have any interest in PVP, for exactly the reason you mentioned, but that doesn't stop me from doing basic, minimal market activity (stuff that doesn't take up a bunch of time). I think some people just assume that anything to do with the market will chew up a bunch of their time, which really isn't true. There are a lot of things you can do that are really low-effort that will still improve your returns quite a lot.
  5. Things I am and am not willing to do in the name of making inf: I don't farm. Ever. I do run missions at high spawn sizes. I usually can't be bothered to defeat all on outdoor maps, but sometimes I do if I'm enjoying the particular mission (this often depends on the enemy type. Some enemies are lots of fun to fight, others are more of a slog). I generally do defeat most, and usually defeat all on indoor missions. I usually check the value of my uncommon/rare recipe drops on AH vs. the value of the enhancement itself, and either sell or craft and sell as appropriate. I always do this with purples, of course. If I happen to get a drop which provides a lucrative conversion opportunity of which I am already aware, I'll take it, but I generally don't seek out those opportunities. I should really probably look for a popmenu mod that shows me what the conversion options are, I know one exists I just haven't gone looking for it. I always put rare salvage on AH and I usually check if uncommon salvage is above vendor price. When I am buying enhancements, if one piece of a set is out of whack in price with the others, I will buy one of the other pieces and convert. This has at times saved me millions of inf. Example, last night I saved 2.5 million on one transaction just by buying a Steadfast Protection End/Res and converting it to the Res/3% def. I do have a tendency to pay "buy it NAO!" prices if they aren't completely ridiculous, but I refuse to reward people who are deliberately jacking up prices to absurd levels. Lately I have more and more started bidding on the enhancements I need, then logging off the character so that I won't pay the "buy it NAO!" price. This is because more of my characters (I've mentioned I have 37, right?) are getting up into the levels where I am buying them set IO's (two more of them hit level 22 last night, and I have two that are closing in on level 50) and thus I am having to be more careful with my inf expenditures. I buy converters with Reward Merits and sell them. I buy unslotters with Reward Merits when I need them. I buy boosters and catalysts on the AH because it's usually a better value than buying them with Merits. I don't convert Emps to Reward Merits, because I use my Emps for Incarnate abilities. When I get all my Incarnate abilities unlocked on my 50's, I'll save the Emps for my alts to use when they hit 50 and unlock their Incarnate slots I funnel inf from my two 50's to all my alts, because my 50's are pretty good at making inf and my alts are not so much. Essentially, I try to do the market activities which return value for the least time investment so I can get back to running missions, which is where the fun is for me.
  6. I have the reverse of this happen sometimes with Spin on my Claws/SR scrapper. The power doesn't animate, but the FX appear and the damage is dealt. I've always assumed it was due to some kind of lag to the server and getting the response too late to play the animation.
  7. For the record, SWTOR does something like this in some of its content, and I have very mixed feelings about it. I like being able to make decisions in single-player content. Not so much in group content that might end up with the team choosing to do something my character wouldn't willingly be a party to.
  8. I'm starting to think that some players view "the market" as some kind of evil cult that if they get involved with it, it will corrupt their pure gaming experience. Or else some kind of arcane mystery that takes hours of investment to understand, perhaps. I mean, I totally understand reluctance to actually put work into the market - I don't put work into the market, because it takes time and I'd rather spend my time running missions. But I am at least willing to take the bare minimum steps to ensure I don't get the worst possible return for my Merits.
  9. Here's one: I kinda miss six-slotting powers for damage.
  10. Having soloed all six TF's for TFC this weekend, I deffinitely have to agree. Citadel is basically "Run the same mission 10 times. Except some of them you don't have to defeat all."
  11. I still don't usually take my travel power until at least 14 on blueside because you don't really need a travel power until then (though I do sometimes take it earlier when a character's concept really demands they be able to fly right from the start). Redside is another matter, though. Mercy without a travel power sucks.
  12. Not so much just the bio itself, but when I wrote the backstory for Red Diamond on Live/Virtue, and pretty much anytime I got into serious roleplay with her, it was hard emotionally because Red was so broken inside (though by the end of my time RP'ing her, she was finally starting to heal). Honestly, even just her bio did get to me a bit, but mostly because it included a list of the crimes this largely innocent girl stood accused of, and that was a little heartbreaking. Especially the multiple homicides, all of which were actually in self-defense except for one, and the one exception was a tragic accident that happened because she panicked and didn't have much control over her powers yet.. but the real villains of her story did their very best to make sure she'd be blamed for everything in order to cover their own trail. (If you're interested in her story, look up "Red Diamond" on VirtueVerse).
  13. That would be... exceedingly out of character for Kitten. Even though I'm not actively roleplaying, my characters chide me if I do things as them that they wouldn't. I do have some redsiders, but most of the time I just prefer playing the hero rather than the villain. Even most (but not all) of my redsiders are Rogues. I just don't usually enjoy being evil, though sometimes I can get into it if I go Darth Vader over the top (like, the only Sith I could ever enjoy playing in SWTOR was my Marauder, because she was pretty much on a permanent rampage).
  14. Yeah, I have Infiltration on my Claws/SR, but sadly I do not have it at Yin TF levels. Though the much bigger problem for my Claws/SR in the Yin TF is not having my AoE defense toggle yet, which means nearly every AoE hits me.
  15. Yep. When you have a volunteer dev team, who presumably have day jobs that consume most of their time, you pretty much have to accept that they won't - and can't - be as thorough as a team that is getting paid to do it as their full-time jobs. For that matter, all of us have seen from CoH Live and other games, even the teams that are getting paid to do it don't always consider everything that they should or completely understand how everything works - even when they built it to begin with. My take is this: The devs are trying their best to do it right. If I don't trust them with at least that much, I'm wasting my time being here at all. That said, I do trust them with that. I've seen no evidence to the contrary. There's a lot of disagreement on exactly what "doing it right" is, and they can't make everyone happy. I would rather they follow their own vision than just do whatever the playerbase wants. I work in software development. One of the first things you learn in software development is that the customer is often wrong. Sometimes I will be the person they choose not to make happy. C'est la vie. If I want everything my way, I should make my own server and that is way the hell too much work, so I have to accept that everything will not be my way. That said, they have done a lot of things that do make me happy. The devs will make mistakes They are human and therefore imperfect. There are significant challenges inherent in trying to maintain and improve a game they didn't design in the first place). They need quality feedback (and not whining or tantrums) to help them get it right. This means when I think they're making (or have made) a mistake, I say so I should always seek to be dispassionate, analytical, and constructive about it rather than letting my emotions get the better of me. This isn't always easy for me, I'm a pretty passionate, emotional person. But getting all riled up over a game does nobody any good. I should be thankful for the work they're doing even when I don't necessarily agree with every decision they make. Which is to say, thank you, HC devs, for all the work that you do. And when I do get riled up about something, please understand that it's because I love the game and I want it to be as great as possible. And I know that you do, too, even if we don't always agree on how to accomplish it. In the end, I don't get everything I want, but I do get to play City of Heroes, and a better version of City of Heroes than we had on Live (which is an impressive accomplishment in and of itself).
  16. Useful info, thank you! I like to try to do stuff like this without relying on these powers as much as possible, so it's nice to know that I can try it without and then if I run into a brick wall, there is still an option to fall back on without having to restart the TF.
  17. Definitely has its uses. I have long used it on my Claws/SR to get better Shockwave cone placement without screwing up the rest of my attack chain (working around the inherent problem with going back and forth between a Ranged Cone and a Melee PBAoE), but I didn't even realize the technique had an actual name until @Nemu enlightened me with regard to other uses for it that I hadn't considered, though. It was just something I did. Somehow, it had never occurred to me how much use I could get out of it on my Energy Blaster!
  18. Randomly powering up Babbage would be rather an upleasant surprise to drop on some poor Synapse TF team. 😛 GM's that aren't triggered by story arc or TF, though, could be interesting.
  19. Another thing that I didn't use that probably would have trivialized it (at the very least, it would have made Hopkins and Countess Crey a lot easier) is Amplifiers. Just the Survial Amp's additional recovery alone would probably have made that fight vastly easier. To say nothing of the Offense Amp. But, again, I wanted to see if I could do it without using any outside assistance... and as it happened, I could. It was just a lot more work to do it that way.
  20. For what it's worth, I didn't say anyone was actually going to DO it. I just said that someone potentially having the ability to do it is a Bad Thing.
  21. And now that I've done it (did all six over the weekend), my own observations to add: Kitten America is Claws/SR, which has an interesting effect on the difficulty of the various task forces (more specifically, on the difficulty of the AV's, which is the only hard part, really). 1). I definitely agree with the OP that Manticore was the most difficult, not just because of the potential of having to fight Hopkins and Countess Crey at the same time (thanks for the tip on how to avoid that), but also in my case because of an odd limitation - I had all my attacks at that level, and enough recharge to run my final attack chain, but I didn't have enough recovery to run it, because I took Conserve Power at level 41 and Physical Perfection at level 44, and my build is tuned such that it needs to have at least one of those to stay positive on Endurance. As such, both Hopkins and Countess Crey proved to be real problems because I had a very narrow margin between "attacking too quickly and running myself out of end" and "not attacking quickly enough to overcome their regen", which made for really long fights. I didn't bring any summons with me, because I wanted to see if I could do it without them. Answer: Yes, but just barely. To anyone else attempting this, I advise you to go ahead and bring a summon, even if you're not planning on using it, just in case. Don't forget that you can't buy stuff from the P2W vendor when you are in the middle of a TF! 2). By the same token, Jurassik was a pushover because I did have those powers and could therefore go all-out on offense. I did bring a summon on that TF, because of the lesson learned from the previous one, but I ended up not needing it. Also, the hunts on the Numina TF were not nearly as bad as some people make them out to be. None of the enemies are really that hard to find if you know where in the zones to look for them. 3). The third-hardest AV (behind Hopkins and Countess Crey) was definitely Clamor, for the simple reason that Scrapper SR doesn't have its AoE defense toggle yet at that level (you don't get it 'til 35!), nor did I have Weave or Tough or Combat Jumping yet. So all the AoE defense I had was from the passive and a couple of set bonuses. That made that fight... interesting. I used my entire inspiration tray just to survive the fight. Of all the AV's, Clamor was the only one that actually came close to killing me. In all the other cases, any challenge (where there was any) was in the area of defeating them. That said, the Yin TF was easily the fastest - I finished it in just under 23 minutes! 4). Dr. Vahzilok was a bit of a problem for similar reasons. Spin was not quite enough to kill off all those exploding zombie waves, and without AoE defense I was having to constantly duck out of range to avoid getting blown up - which of course let Doc V regen a bit every time I had to do it. Really, though, calling it a problem is overstating it; the outcome was never in doubt, it just took longer than I would have liked because of having to avoid the explosions. 5). The Clockwork King was surprisingly easy. I expected more of a challenge from him. Also, while the Synapse TF is definitely a slog, it wasn't quite as bad as I remembered it being. Thanks to everyone on Torchbearer who showed up to help out with Babbage! 6). Just as I agreed with the OP about which of the AV's was hardest, I also have to agree about which was easiest. Vandal really didn't put up much of a fight at all. Also, I think the Citadel TF is unquestionably the most boring of them all, because it's basically the same mission over and over again. Anyway, thank you again for the guide, it was helpful!
  22. Yes, I said that myself, if you go back and read my posts. I explicitly said that if someone is willing to put actual effort into it, they can make lots more money than I do by actually USING the converters. My point was that even with minimal effort (i.e. just buying converters with Reward Merits and then selling them), any casual player can make a whole lot of inf. Or rather, that was the intermediate point on the way to my actual point, which was that the possibility of someone crashing the market by AFK farming thousands of Emp merits, converting them, and flooding the market with items bought with Reward Merits is a Bad Thing for nearly everyone.
  23. I don't think this is actually "gaming" the AH. This is the very nature of an auction house. It's the way an auction house works and the way it's intended to be used. Converters are an extremely high-demand item. They can be bought with Merits. They can be sold for inf. The devs who made the design decisions to make Converters exist, be purchasable with merits, and be sellable on the Auction House fully intended for them to be used as a means of converting Merits to Inf. If they didn't, they would have made Converters account-bound rather than making them sellable. These market forces are not mysterious; they're at play in both the real world and in every other MMO that has ever had an auction house, and they are well-documented. I promise you, the devs knew that these items would be used for currency exchange when they created them. EDIT: I should add, this exchange is largely beneficial to the player base, because the ready availability of Converters drives down the prices of the most expensive enhancements by providing more ways to generate them than simply from drops. EDIT 2: To expand on this: Converters were made tradeable as an anti-scarcity measure. Private servers will inevitably have lower population than Live did. This tends to lead to problems with scarcity of rare items. Making them tradeable specifically enables their use as a means of currency exchange, and thus ensures their wide availability to those who are willing to spend the time converting and reselling, thus ensuring the most valuable enhancements are continually available even at lower server populations. This is working precisely as intended.
  24. Exactly. "Flipping" would be the higher-effort solution I talked about. The one that makes you lots more inf but I don't have the patience to do the market research required to do it effectively.
  25. For what it's worth, I actually agree with you., even though I've never done an Emp Merit -> Reward Merit conversion, and probably won't be doing one anytime soon.
×
×
  • Create New...