Yomo Kimyata

As mentioned, ATOs listed on the /AH are listed by fellow players, so your previous purchases depended on someone else offering what you wanted at 6mm. You may want to consider raising your bids, because 6mm seems awfully low by historical standards. You can, of course, purchase ATOs using reward merits from any merit vendor. The rub here is that it costs 100 merits to buy any given ATO, and generally you can use 100 merits to buy other items, sell them, and be able to buy ATOs in the market for cheaper. That depends on someone else having already put the ATO you want up for sale. Also, Hero and Vigilante packs will, on average, have 1.2 ATOs in them. There might be one. There might be two. There might be none. And of course the odds of one of them being exactly what you want are slim. But you can always use converters to change them into what you want. It just might take a long time and a lot of converters.

I have, and I *will* talk more about this in the future, but in general giving up a damage aura for Hide is, in my books, a pure win across the board. Mud Pots is possibly the best damage aura because of being able to slot Slow, but even so, I'd much rather 6 slot all my effective attacks than 5 or 6 slot a damage aura, generally. Exceptions: I need to slot superior avalanche somewhere; I had an extra power slot and wanted to put in one or more knockdown procs.

Now, let me start with one of my first alts on HC which was my Staff/Bio stalker. Staff: Losing Staff Mastery and Innocuous Strikes is no big deal. The only stance I have every used is form of the Body, and you get that for free as a stalker! Innocuous Strikes is a meh power with no real additional utility, and gaining a big ST damage dealer is great! Bio: I never really thought about it at first, but Genetic Corruption feels like an upgrade over Genetic Contamination. The sleep really isn't critical, but I can slot a purple set in there that helps me with good bonuses. Let's face it, we're not killing enemies with Genetic Corruption. I later made a Staff/Bio scrapper, and yeah, it was not as good a build in my eyes. What are your thoughts?

So I've been taking a little break from scrapping and leveling up some of my stalkers. Now I absolutely understand the difference in the ATs and the playstyles and so on, but I've found it interesting to look at the power differences across sets. Sometimes the balance is subtle, and sometimes I find there are scrapper builds that I would much rather play as a stalker not because I want high single target damage but because the powers work better for me. I'm focusing on the difference between scrappers and stalkers, but on a broader basis it's mostly similar to scrapper/brute/tanker v. stalkers. For the most part I haven't been delving into the difference between powers with the same name that might have different stats on City of Data (all hail Uberguy). Here's what I see as the differences, and please sing out if I got things wrong or missed stuff: PRIMARY: All Primaries: Lose Confront, gain Placate Broad Sword: Lose Whirling Sword; gain Assassin's Slash. Claws: Lose Spin, Follow Up; gain Assassin's Claw, Build Up. Dark Melee: Lose Dark Consumption, Soul Drain; gain Assassin's Eclipse, Build Up. Dual Blades: Lose Typhoon's Edge, Blinding Feint; gain Assassin's Blades, Build Up. Electrical Melee: Lose Lightning Clap; gain Assassin's Shock. Energy Melee: Lose Whirling Hands; gain Assassin's Strike. Fiery Melee: Lose Incinerate; gain Assassin's Blaze. Ice Melee: Lose Greater Ice Sword; gain Assassin's Ice Sword. Kinetic Melee: Lose Power Siphon, Repulsing Torrent; gain Assassin's Strike, Build Up. Martial Arts: Lose Dragon's Tail; gain Assassin's Blow. Katana/Ninja Blade: Lose The Lotus Drops; gain Assassin's Blade. Psionic Melee: Lose Concentration, Psi Blade Sweep; gain Concentration, Assassin's Psi Blade. Radiation Melee: Lose Fusion, Irradiated Ground; gain Assassin's Corruption, Build Up. Savage Melee: Lose Blood Thirst, Vicious Slash, gain Assassin's Frenzy, Build Up. Spines: Lose Quills, gain Assassin's Impaler. Staff: Lose Staff Mastery, Innocuous Strikes, gain Assassin's Staff, Build Up. Stone Melee: Lose Heavy Mallet, gain Assassin's Smash. Street Justice: Lose Combat Readiness, Rib Cracker; gain Assassin's Strike, Build Up. SECONDARY: Bio Armor: Lose Inexhaustible, Evolving Armor, Genetic Contamination; gain Hide, Boundless Energy, Genetic Corruption. Dark Armor: Lose Death Shroud, Cloak of Darkness; gain Hide, Shadow Dweller. Electric Armor: Lose Lightning Field; gain Hide. Energy Aura: Lose Dampening Field, Entropic Aura, Energy Protection, Energy Cloak; gain Hide, Entropy Shield, Kinetic Dampening, Disrupt. Fiery Aura: Lose Blazing Aura, Fiery Embrace; gain Hide, Cauterizing Blaze. Ice Armor: Lose Icicles; gain Hide. Invulnerability: Lose Resist Elements, Resist Energy, Invincibility; gain Hide, Environmental Resistance, Invincible. Ninjitsu: Lose Shinobi-Iri, Seishinteki Kyoyo, Bo Ryaku; gain Hide, Caltrops, Smoke Flash. Radiation Armor: Lose Beta Decay, gain Hide. Regeneration: Lose Quick Recovery, gain Hide. Shield Defense: Lose Phalanx Fighting, gain Hide. Stone Armor: Lose Mud Pots, gain Hide. Super Reflexes: Lose Lucky, gain Hide. Willpower: Lose Rise to the Challenge, Quick Recovery; gain Hide, Reconstruction. ANCILLARY: Body Mastery: Lose Conserve Power; gain Superior Conditioning. Weapon Mastery: Lose Caltrops; gain Physical Perfection.

Good, bad, Discord is the guy with the gun. (No guns were used in the creation of this post. I don't use discord because I think it is a pile of shit in terms of would want to get out of it. There's lots of good collaborative software out there for projects. There's lots of good posting software out there for putting your opinion out there. Discord is garbage for the purposes I would want to use it for, and if it's great for other people, hoorah, good for them!)

I've spent some time recently getting my KM/Ice scrapper to 50, and I will eventually get my KM/Fire stalker there as well. I'm always one to look at "underpowered" sets and determine for myself if I think that it is true that they are actually underpowered. First of all, the animations. Initially I didn't like them, and I guess I still don't. But when I checked in Mids, the damage per animation values weren't any worse that the other sets I looked at. I think that it's a perceptual issue, at least I think it is for me. Some animations I hate, because they are clearly superfluous and there to add time so that the power can be made higher damage. Anything with a flip, like Ripper or Eviscerate. But I don't mind things like Guarded Spin or Eye of the Storm, because the length of the animation seems justified. Hey, hold your horses, I'm break dancing here! To me, a lot of the longer animations for KM seem unnecessary thematically. But heavens forbid we make them shorter and take away some of our damage! So I think this one is a push -- I don't love the animations, but I understand that they are long because they enable the balance that brings higher damage. Second, the damage. It *feels* like less damage than similar sets although I'm certainly not quantifying this by parsing combat logs. And again, I understand why this is because the entire nature of the KM gimmick is that a successful hit on an enemy lowers the damage they put out. Not just to you, but to everyone on your team. It's the counterpart to the -to hit debuffs of Dark Melee (which is also not the highest damage set). And as far as I know, the damage reduction isn't resistible. So, again this one makes sense to me. The problem is that in the current meta, the tradeoff between damage inflicted and survivability is extremely weighted towards damage. It's really difficult to get defeated at all unless you are pushing the envelope, either solo or on teams. And thanks to SCORE and HC there is virtually no penalty for being defeated. I don't even know if XP debt even exists anymore, there are a multitude of powers to resurrect you, and even getting back to the mission takes a push of a teleport power button. If damage gets increased, then this continues to undermine the damage/survivability trade off. So I'm inclined to call this working as intended, unless you want to change "intended" to "survivability is irrelevant". Third, the strategy. In a lot of ways this set is like Claws. Melee + PBAoE + ranged cone + ranged, and a non-Build Up Build Up power. But the bells and whistles take a little getting used to. I'm only going to speak from a scrapper perspective, since I don't have enough data otherwise. At first I actually avoided Concentrated Strike. The animation was so long that I felt I was probably getting more done by using shorter powers. And the nature of Power Siphon leads people to try to get as many levels of siphon mode as they can. But eventually I came around to a different playstyle. Hit Power Siphon whenever it is up, and use Concentrated Strike so long as it is not overkill for your given enemy. A normal Build Up is 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for 90 seconds of cooldown (which of course can be cut dramatically, but as a scrapper you can't stack it). Power Siphon is 20 seconds with a variable amount of +damage and +7.5% to hit for 120 seconds of cooldown. Getting it to reactivate resets the timer, and appears to stack, so every once in a while I end up with over +200% damage and 22.5% tohit. You can't depend on that sure, but by my observation the 20% activation rate on Concentrated Strike matches my results, and that means roughly one our of every 25 times, you are going to reset PS twice in a row and those numbers are wow. Now of course, you can't depend on that, but overall do I want to trade off a 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for lower +damage and lower +to hit for 20 seconds? Depends on your build, but yeah, sometimes. Also, the -damage gimmick is mostly a gimmick with the exception of Burst, which affects up to ten targets for twice as much reduction for 7 seconds. My builds are focusing on Burst, Concentrated Strike, and Power Siphon. It seems to me this power set is working as intended, but the problem is that currently players intend it to do more damage rather than to do more damage in relation to added survivability. I doubt I'll ever play this as a tank or a brute, but I'll definitely work on my stalker at some point.

Boo!

Follow up question: I have a character that I want to dedicate towards helping others get this . He is 50 and has completed most of Makos entire arc( not just the unlock mission but way beyond that, but not completed.) can this alt pick up other patron arcs without doing it through Ouro (which would required people being on my team from the beginning)?

I used this on Live to great effect.

I agree with this. I keep trying to like SR, but my playstyle just has too many attacks coming in, and 5% of attacks getting through is just too many without mitigation. If you are playing x3, or on a team with a taunter then sure, it's great! But for me it's a numbers game and the numbers on the other side are many and irrational. Possibly imaginary.

An oft repeated request is the ability to stop receiving threads from content, and that would solve some of the problems. In SCORE and HC, the powers that be wanted to make getting all incarnates extremely fast and easy. The problem, it appears, is that when you have quickly and easily gotten all the incarnate powers you want, you are still getting drops that are no longer useful to you. So by all means I support being able to turn off all threads and shards.

I have at least one character that was bitten by a radioactive straw. Broke her back.

I will build my characters strong from the very beginning, so I prefer to push the envelope. When I make a new alt, one of the first things I do is put settings to +1/x1, bosses, no AV. From there, it'll depend on the AT, but generally for melee characters I'm targeting +3/x8 sometime in the 40s but I'll hold off on +4 until I ding 50 and catalyze and respec in the HOs and purples. Sometimes I will +4 earlier, but as you know that results in +5s half the time, and I don't always build for accuracy that early. On an aside, this is one reason why I level like mad! I'll usually shift to AVs at some point, but it depends on the character and the AV. Usually my builds are good for +4/x8 mobs but not necessarily for +4 AVs, which is something I need to think about. If I'm soloing a TF/SF with AVs, I will probably downshift to +2/x8 for missions that I know will have AVs in them.

I suspect that an unanticipated problem was overuse. Given that hero/winter packs were primarily pay-for, I don't think the programming of the system was geared up for massive usage. So when SCORE and HC decided to make the goodies available to everyone, it may have overloaded the system? This is conjecture on my part, but opening packs and claiming items from Character Items went from easy and cheerful to broken. I think that the current workaround is some sort of timer on claims, but that's enough to keep me from opening a hundred packs in a session. Then again, I'm not delving into the code, so what do I know?!?

I would love it if there were an additional/different option to randomize that would allow you set certain parameters and then randomize within those parameters. Hats, trenchcoat, no back items, no aura for example.

Allow customization of fire and ice swords. That would change everything at such a low cost!

I read this and instantly thought that the problem was not enough character slots on the server. Damned altitis!

In that case, Fire Melee is your huckleberry. No specific mitigation inherent to the set. Kill them before they kill you.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to use the tools available, like IO sets, but I have a hard time rationalizing setting balance around SOs, for example. It's like travelling to Madrid for vacation, but you don't speak Spanish so you can't ask around or read about about the best things to see and do. "That's ok, we can teach you Spanish!" "Nope, I don't wanna learn Spanish." "Ok, how about we translate for you into English?" "No, I don't wanna do that either." It's totally ok if you don't want to, but I'm pretty glad I've learned Spanish! But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, to each their own.

Emphasis mine, and I agree with you. Or even put packs of spectrals which will debuff you to single digit to hit numbers when you are 10. But it also demonstrates to me that the only real challenge for a well built character at or near 50 is defense debuffs or other such things (like auto-hit enervating field). You probably could have gone AFK again many different enemy groups with the same outcome!

I don't remember exactly when I joined Live -- it was sometime before I6 but not long before since I was neither surprised nor outraged at ED being enacted. But the change that caused me the most joy was when they first instituted ragdoll physics. Again, no idea when that was. But watching your opponents crumble and fold up and swing in completely unexpected and literally broken ways brought me a LOT of amusement. Still does, even though they made it much more "realistic".

Well, it seems to me that different builds are going to have different hurdles. If you have to hit debuff resistance and confuse resistance, then yes, CoT are roughly Council difficulty at +4/x8 at 40+. Now what we *could* do is replace all CoT with Crey, who really got buffed up recently, at level 40+. Then we'd really be cooking!

I also have played this on all four melee ATs, and stalker seemed the best overall (and scrapper the worst). Keep in mind this was back when I first came to HC and I didn't know as much as I know now about the mechanics of this game (all hail Uberguy), so initially I didn't even use ATOs. Stalker is a great set for this combo for a couple of reasons. Getting Form of the Body for free is great (saves you a power pick) and you probably would never miss the other forms at all. I can't recall ever using any other forms on the other ATs. AS gives you more single target damage, which is sorely needed since Sky Splitter is in my opinion sadly subpar. Genetic Corruption is in my opinion better than Genetic Contamination since you can get some good purple bonuses from the sleep set, although it's not as taunt-y. I haven't played this alt for some time, but I think a current build would go something like this. You can certainly cut the Force of Will pool if you wish and move in a different direction, either with a different power pool like Teleport or epic pool. Mids screws up HO/DSO so the export link will be more informative than the text.

I often take Tough at 14. Often it is my first resistance power, and the first two slots go towards giving me 6% defense to all. Next two slots go towards getting decent S&L resistance/endurance and a 2.5% discount on all my powers that use endurance. It's good stuff at level 15, and I generally respec it later. Weave, on the other hand, gets postponed until I need it.