BasiliskXVIII

Just to set expectations: I didn’t want to “race” this character to 50. I’m deliberately taking it slowly, mostly soloing through story arcs, and I didn’t touch Sonic Melee on Beta at all. The concept didn’t initially grab me, but then the name Treblemaker came to mind and that was that. This isn’t a full guide, just first impressions of the set so far. I’ll update as I level if people are interested. I’m level 21 at the moment, so we’re not talking 4 Star ITFs yet. I only a handful of low-level IOs that have dropped or which I had in storage, I'm mostly running SOs. This is my experience as a Sonic/Dark stalker. Attune This is clearly the most contentious power in the set, and I understand why. It doesn’t completely ruin the experience for me, but it has both real strengths and real friction, so YMMV. Attune is a single-target toggle that does a slow but significant DoT and amplifies your other Sonic attacks against that target. It suppresses while you’re hidden, so you can put it on an unaware enemy without breaking stealth; the damage only starts once you’re revealed. What’s good about it? It’s surprisingly effective at disrupting enemies who have interruptible abilities. Sky Raider Engineers are the easiest example: you can drop Attune on one, AS the boss, and the Engineer won’t get their FFG up because the trickle damage keeps interrupting them. It feels very proactive in a way that the game doesn't often encourage, so this stands out. What’s less good? It’s still a toggle. You want it up constantly, which means dragging it from target to target as things die or scatter. Without Attune running, your ST damage feels slightly below average; with it, slightly above average. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the lack of it is noticeable. I don't usually enhance until level 12, because it normally goes so fast, but because I held off on grabbing Attune immediately, my damage felt lackluster in a way that was unpleasant. So you’re encouraged, pressured even, to get it early and keep it rolling nonstop. The sound effect is also loud. Very loud. If anyone knows the internal name so I can silence it, you’ll have my eternal gratitude. There’s also a build-pressure angle. Stalkers already want early AS, Placate, Build Up, status protection, and their main defensive tools. Needing to wedge Attune in early too makes the low-level power curve feel even more crowded. Playing without it feels anemic; playing with it feels like one more spinning plate. There’s another issue with Attune that becomes obvious once you play around with it for a bit: it demands animation time without paying that time back in immediate impact. In most melee sets, your T3 power is either a heavy single-target attack or a cone; something that justifies a bit of animation with a meaningful chunk of damage delivered as ST or AoE. Attune does neither. It’s a setup move, and setup moves only feel good when the set rewards you for using them. The damage it offers accumulates to be significant. But that's very much outside of the Stalker philosophy. The rest of the set The yellow “-res(debuff)” visuals still look strange to me, but the mechanic is interesting. Stalkers get a baked-in -ToHit in Assassin’s Strike, so technically you’re getting at least one boosted effect, but at only 5–6% extra effect per stack, the benefit isn’t huge, to say nothing of the unlikeliness of performing a slow AS after having hit them with other attacks. Generally, this will be more of an incidental team play bonus than something you'll benefit from solo, except with a few specific armour sets, and even then the debuff is small enough to make it mostly irrelevant. It feels like it's mostly just there because Sonic's thing is -res(damage), and the devs didn't want lots of that in a melee set, you do still get to apply that with your AS, though. What’s more notable is the status effects sprinkled through the set. • T1 has a chance for knockdown. • T2 has a chance for hold. • Assassin’s Whisper is a Mag 5 sleep, so anything you AS and don’t kill will most likely be asleep unless it has purple triangles. Unfortunately, Assassin’s Whisper does not allow sleep sets, so you can’t slot Fortunata’s Hypnosis: Chance for Placate, which would have been probably the best possible use for it. The proc chances for the status effectsare low, so you’re not turning into a miniature Stalktroller (Stalminator?), but slotting a Lockdown +2 Mag proc in one of the early attacks might be an interesting experiment later. In closing That’s where things stand at level 21. The rest of the set has charm, but Attune is the piece that isn’t landing. It’s an “attention tax,” it doesn’t move with your target, and it eats animation time without giving you the kind of immediate impact every other melee T3 offers. The delayed payoff is real, but it doesn’t feel good in the rhythm of a Stalker’s chain, and the damage bump doesn’t quite justify the micromanagement. If it behaved more like a PBAoE buff, or simply auto-shifted to your current target, the whole set would breathe better. Even so, the kit has enough texture (status effects, utility moments, and a distinct identity) that I’m curious to see how it develops with a full chain and proper slotting. I’ll keep levelling Treblemaker and update once I can see how the set performs in the 30–40 range, where melee sets usually reveal their real shape. Edit: I decided to test the volume of attune with a dB meter on my phone at about 1' from the speaker. Not the most accurate thing, but good enough for my needs. I was getting a baseline of 53-55dB when just getting ambient noises. Most of the other powers - Sonic Thrust, Strident Echo, and Assassin's Whisper took me to between 60-63db. Attune? Maxed out at 72dB. So, from your ear's perspective that's about twice as loud. Very disruptive when you are expected to reapply it 2-3 times per fight.

The irony here is that the very thing you’re “correcting” me about, that American English isn’t a single uniform accent, applies just as strongly to French. Parisian French isn’t Occitan, isn’t Bretonnais, isn’t Lyonnais, isn’t Réunionnais, isn’t Algerian Maghrebi, isn’t Québecois, isn’t Acadian. No major language is a monolith. But that diversity is beside the point. My argument wasn’t “there is only one American accent” any more than I’d claim “there is only one French accent.” The argument is that no accent in any variety of French produces the kind of orthographic butchery shown in the original text. It’s not dialect, it’s not idiolect; it’s just anglocentric misuse of a diacritic as decoration. Every "é" in the original text, if we read it as French, sounds approximately like "ay" (there's no y-glide in French, so it's not entirely the same, but in IPA terms we're talking about [e] as opposed to [ei]). So what you should be reading is: That isn't a French accent. It's also not the accent of someone speaking any language that uses "é" differently, such as Gaeilge [e:], Portuguese [ɛ], Vietnamese [e˧˥] (tone-dependent) or Icelandic [jɛ]. It’s the same kind of anglocentric disrespect you see when people throw Я, Ф, or И into English words to make them look “Soviet.” The creator isn’t thinking about language or phonetics. They’re treating someone else’s writing system as a novelty font. It doesn’t resemble Russian, it doesn’t resemble French, and it doesn’t resemble any real accent. It’s just aesthetic appropriation of symbols they don’t understand.

If they're going for a French accent, not like that. This is the equ'alent of try'ng to simulate an Am'can ac'ent by sim'y d'pping ran'om le'rs and re'acing them with apo'rophes. The result isn't anything like the American accent and kinda makes a vaguely offensive caricature.

Not sure if this is actually a bug or just a really strange decision for the animation, but when you use the interruptible version of Assassin's Whisper, shortly after going into the "charge up" phase, a sonic wave effect flies sort of diagonally up and away from you. It doesn't do anything to the enemy, it's just kind of present. Then, about a half second later the attack proper fires and you get the power animation.. I don't know if this is a a power effect that's being called at the wrong time, or aimed at the wrong place, but it looks unintentional. (starts at about 1 sec into the attached clip) Assassin's Whisper.mp4

You're thinking of a satyr. Satire is a heraldic symbol consisting of a diagonal cross shaped like an "X".

Or you could slot the Overpowering Presence: Chance for Energy Font or Dominating Grasp: Chance for Fiery Orb ATO into Mass Confusion, Mass Hypnosis or Total Domination.

Because it’s unethical to sell something when the buyer has no genuine rights over what they’ve paid for. It doesn't stop a lot of companies, but that doesn't make it right. ...I swear, some people want to buy the cross they'll be crucified on.

The PVP sets drop infrequently but with enough consistency that you should see at least a few as you level. The recipes sell well, so you can just sell them and use the proceeds to buy the part you want. But another alternative is that you can craft them up and use enhancement converters to convert to the set you're interested in, and then convert within the set until you get the piece you want. Depending how lucky you are, this can be either a cheaper or more expensive option.

Huh. TIL!

Well, I mean there was this one guy I know who tried to build a castle in a swamp. I told him he was crazy.

It's pretty easy to see there's no difference in run speed between land and water: (SS increases jump speed when you're running, which explains the difference there, though it isn't relevant in this case.) Any perception that there's a difference is probably due to their being fewer nearby references. You don't see buildings flying past at high speed because they generally don't build buildings in the water.

Oh, jeez. I do have 2 Sentinels, no 50s. They're in the main list, but totally forgot they existed when doing my calculations at the end. I guess it comes down to a question of whether you think apathy or antipathy is worse...

This prompted me to go take a look: Certainly paints a pretty definitive picture of my playstyle preferences. The answer would definitively be Kheldians. Worst AT and it's not close.

There's a blue Tardis surrounded by Weeping Angels in the RWZ, as well as one on top of Pocket D, from what I understand.

I mean, please don't take this as a clap back to your points, because I think we're in agreement. I just think it needs to be reinforced with as many voices as possible that setting the expectation of optimal performance at +2 is deeply unfair to people who are more interested in the 1-50 side of the game than the 50+ part of the game. Particularly since on some of the smaller servers it's very difficult to get enough interest to actually fire the large team content. This feels very much like the dev team is getting away from the philosophy of "the game is not balanced around IO builds" if, in order to maintain parity with the current state, you're expected to have a bunch of +MaxHP bonuses to share. I don't know if my experience with the game is different than most, but I don't typically invest into basic IOs until level 35, and IO sets until I'm able to slot the max level for the sets. So even if it is better for a level 50 running at +4/x8, it feels like the expectation becomes "Please don't play the game. Powerlevel your MMs to 50 in a fire farm and get yourself kitted out there, and then you can be useful." Because the 1-50 gameplay is already kind of a slog on MMs, and they want to make this worse. Devs, put this change back in the oven; it ain't done baking yet.

This is all well and good, but what about the 49 levels that aren't 50? If I'm still running a 95% SO'd out level 25 MM, I'm not doing it at +2. I don't have +MaxHP bonuses from IO slotting. This feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul, when Peter's already trying to figure out which meal to skip so he doesn't have to buy food.

Ultimately the whole problem with this encounter is it doesn't feel very "comic book" at all. If Hydra had a recruitment drive on the streetcorner, and when Thor went to check it out, three of the Hydra agents attacked, the fourth wouldn't just be "running off" unless it was to set up another beat to the encounter. Either it would be to set up a chase after the runner, at which point he would be detained by Black Widow throwing bolas around his legs or something, or he would return with something else, escalating the scene. Here, he just runs away, leaving the encounter feeling like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Part of that is that we're not able to meaningfully interact with the world in any way other than by attacking it, which is why I'm more than fine with "defeating" the runner as an understood shorthand for "detaining". According to the lore of the game that's what your characters are doing anyway. Yes, even when you shoot him with a high powered rifle. Have the recruiter run away, only to come back with a Goliath War Walker. Or, and I don't know if it's possible to do this, but have these mobs drop a tip mission afterwards to track the guy down to a recruitment centre. Something to make the encounter feel like this recruiter has a purpose. Otherwise, why not just have the same setup as in Independence port where the recruiters are just average Council goons and you can take them down?

Paolo Tirelli is an Italian national and political dignitary. As he is directing operations of a militant organization operating on US soil, this makes them a foreign-backed terrorist organization. Even if they aren't recognised as such by the state department, there is leeway for federal enforcement groups such as the FBI to treat crimes as such, and as deputised members of the FBSA, it stands to reason that heroes might be extended that same right. As a recruiter for an FTO, the recruiter is potentially in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2339B (material support to a designated FTO) and § 2339A (material support for terrorist acts) both apply to groups “foreign in origin or control.” The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) would also require anyone acting under Tirelli’s direction to register as an agent of a foreign principal; failing to do so while engaging in political or paramilitary activity would itself be a federal crime. Further, as the Council soldiers are concealing long guns, which is absolutely illegal in the state of Rhode Island, the recruiter could be subject to conspiracy charges since armed accompaniment in furtherance of a cause would suggest coordinated unlawful activity rather than mere speech. In any normal real-world scenario, the police response to a recruitment drive like this should be expected to be immediate and forceful. The recruiter wouldn't be let off the hook simply because he's not an active combatant. And when Spider-Man regularly detains even unarmed burglars in the commission of robberies, it seems fair that our heroes could do the same when, by the standards established by the game, it is expected that our heroes are using non-lethal force against enemies by default.

I haven't noticed any issues with my Dominator's FF procs, but I did have a problem with my /Nin Blaster not critting despite Shinobi being active. In that case I was able to get it proccing crits again by turning off the power and turning it back on. Maybe try using an enhancement unslotter to remove and re-slot the IO? You may also want to try turning on all the pet damage chat to your combat window and doing /logchat with some combat and running the log it produces through a log parser like Carnifax's to see if you can get exact numbers for how frequently it is proccing to get more information.

I was playing my Storm/Nin earlier and noticed to myself it had been a long time since I'd noticed a crit. Looking back through my combat logs I found there wasn't a single instance of " You hit ~ with your Shinobi Skills for # points of Lethal damage (CRITICAL).", Shinobi was on, so I turned on chat logging, and tested. Got through about 4 missions and never once saw a crit. Now I'm thinking Ninjitsu is broken, so I hit up the beta server and make a character there, level it to 30, same as live, and test. Works fine. Come back to live and it's still not going. The power is showing as active and the little glowing pulse is orbiting the icon, but failing any other ideas, I go back to tech support. Turn it off, then on again. Immediately after doing that and my crits come back. Is this just a weird bug? Known issue? Has anyone else noticed this?

Keep in mind too that the other part of the lore is on Statesman's side of things. Talos claims to have been present for thousands of years, but if he was, then he wasn't public, because per Statesman's profile on the City of Heroes website: "Cole claimed to have unlocked the power of his own Inner Will, an obscure explanation at best. Whatever their true origin, it was undeniable that Cole possessed something that hadn't been seen since the age of the Greek Heroes: superpowers." This is also consistent with the description in the Web of Arachnos novel, where the reappearance of superpowers is directly related to Cole and Richter opening the Well of the Furies. Even Zoria's lore doesn't contradict with this, as he and his followers are an occultists in the 1890s-1910s, but there's no mention of actual magic powers. They descend to the US to search for Oranbega, and aren't heard from again until 1933, where they are now possessed by the ancient Oranbegans and thwarted by the Dream Doctor. Giovanna Scaldi is an unusual outlier, but also a psychic, and the Origin of Power arc carves out a special place for that which could potentially explain that discrepancy. But Talos, if he was stomping around raising islands in the 1850s–60s, would blow a hole in all of that. A 300-foot giant tearing up the coastline and reshaping geography is the kind of event that would define the age, not quietly vanish into folklore. It would directly contradict Statesman’s “nothing since the Greek Age” statement and make the 1930s rediscovery of superpowers feel nonsensical. In an age where powers are intended to be commonplace, however, such as post-1930, the idea that Talos' great battle is just another Thursday in Paragon City makes sense.

"Terrific" may have started to broaden in meaning by the 18th century, but the bigger issue isn’t the word itself, it’s how papers of the era actually wrote. Nineteenth-century journalism just didn’t work in catchphrases. The idea that “the newspapers” would all settle on a single nickname like The Terrific Titan feels totally out of step with how the press operated back then, in no small part because communication between the newspapers would be minimal. There's also generally no page-spanning headlines to slap nicknames into to catch attention with. I'd suggest taking at look at the newspapers of the time. The US Library of Congress has a huge collection of scanned copies from all over what was then the US. The style is almost alien to modern readers: front pages were often devoid of what we’d call “news,” columns ran unbroken for paragraphs, and concision simply wasn’t a goal. If anything, each paper likely would have come up with its own florid moniker every time they mentioned him, because that was part of the showmanship. One week he’d be The Giant of Paragon Bay, the next The Mighty Colossus Who Guards Our Shores. That kind of linguistic one-upmanship was how editors sold papers; no one was trying to standardise a brand identity. The use of a concise, repeatable sobriquet like The Terrific Titan belongs much more to the 20th century, when syndication and headline punch became a style in itself. So while it’s technically possible the lore meant the 1850s, everything about the phrasing, the unified nickname, and the rhythm reads like mid-century pulp rather than antebellum reportage.

If it were on a plaque in game, I could maybe see this being played off as the description of someone from the late 19th century calling back to the years before, but this was setting information for visitors to the official CoH website. It would be very, very odd to make several references to the 20th century, but leave the only years in the description not given a century be referring to the century prior. It also mentions newspapers calling Talos the "Terrific Titan", which is really punchy mid-20th century attention-getting sort of name that would feel anachronistic if it were actually happening in the antebellum period, where more florid, verbose, and religious speech made up the majority of broadsheet headlines. You'd expect something like "Paragon City's modern-day Goliath" rather than "Terrific Titan", especially since at the time "terrific" would be used to mean "inducing terror" and not "fantastic or extraordinary". The villain would be terrific, not the hero. Is it impossible that it could be from 1850s and '60s? No. But I think interpreting it like that would be a significant reach given the context surrounding it.

It seems to happen when the mob has an inherent fly ability and is held while knocked back/knocked up. I think it's caused by an interaction between reduced movement friction from flight and the momentum given to the character by the forced movement when the mob's movement AI is disabled. In effect, the same thing that give you that slip-slidey movement in Fly sees the mob suddenly moving at high speed and goes "I know what to do here!" and goes "you went at this speed in this direction, so you keep going that way until the momentum burns off." It has no pathing to try and fight the movement, so since it ends up so far away and the hold still has to wear off, by the time it's free it's just chilling as far up as it can. I've noticed the same effect on Rikti Drones with my hold and Levitate on Mind Control. Pyro is particularly noticeable for this because it has so much KU, but it's not specifically a pyro control issue. The only way I would imagine that they could kill it is by removing that movement friction reduction effect from enemies. But I haven't really noticed them drift in the same way as players, so that reduced friction may only be there because it's essentially calling a copy of the same flight power and the AI's pathing just kind of ignores the drift.

It's weird, but it is consistent with how they've handled powers that are just a flat bonus damage of a given type in the past. Fire Armour's "Fiery Embrace" adds fire damage but according to the detailed info in game, does nothing at all. It's not actually giving +damage, it's giving you a proc with a 100% chance to fire on all of your powers.