legendaryjman

In reading through this thread, ya'll need Castle, and it shows.

I agree with Willpower. The set has its own passive health and stamina powers that stack with the health and stamina you already get. Then you get a self rez, and Unstoppable light. You never stop never stopping.

I believe "because I have to respec" should not be a reason to stop a change. There can be plenty of reasons a change is not the correct decisions, but if a change doesn't actually effect current builds, that means there shouldn't be a change in the first place. Which, of course, there can be an argument made that there shouldn't be any changes and the way the game was ended in 2012 should be the way the game is always and forever more, but I don't agree with that argument and think changes to all things should keep coming.

There is most likely a more elegant solution to super strength. Add all the Unleashed Might changes to all of the powers to make them awesome. Keep Rage the way it is and add in the hand clap changes as a second hand clap called Shock Wave or something. I don't think we really need to jump through hoops to make a powerset better, just make it better.

Even if the playerbase was lowering, which I still disbelieve, what does it matter? We are not in any kind of worry of the game closing down, the servers are paid for within seconds of the donations being opened up. The game could be one person running AE missions by themselves and as long that person pays for the servers everything is fine. Doom posting is not helpful for anyone. Instead, why don't we focus on actual constructive feedback. I will go first. I liked the idea of the Super Strength changes. As someone who primarily played and Invuln/SS tanker on live I can confidently say that SS is donk. What they had going sounded really really good. The only question I feel they should consider is why should someone take Rage. It gives a damage and to hit buff, but has the crash at the end. Unleashed Might sounds so good. Gives increased damage, to hit, and extra utility to all of the SS powers. There is no downside. If you ever wanted to use normal hand clap you just untoggle Unleashed Might, hand clap, and toggle it back on. If there are going to be mutually exclusive powers there has to be situations to take one or the other and Unleashed Might is so good Rage is obsolete. I did not like the Tier 9 changes. I feel making something like Unstoppable only last for 30 seconds defeats the purpose of the power and am glad they are not going forward with them.

The observation of the difficulty setting not being what you expect it is a valid observation. That being said, how are you not tearing through whites and yellows as a beast mastermind? You and your good boys should be eating those minions like they are kibble.

I am sad that this type of doom and gloom followed this game from live. The playerbase is not dwindling. People are playing the game just fine.

While CuppaJo was fine, i was never a fan of Ex Libris. I liked all the early devs that posted a lot: Statesman, Positron, Castle. Oh Castle. he tried so hard.

I'm surprised respecs aren't just all the time. Why limit them? We aren't trying to impress any shareholders.

Was the term Pool Boy for an only power pool character? It sounds equally fascinating and terrifying.

Alright. That does help me see the vision. I can get s/l/e/n to the def cap but that is it. That is why there are so many utility powers and debuffs as the other powers. I am mitigating damage by being obnoxious to the enemies over just raw defense. We shall see how it goes.

A merry Winter Event to you too.

I am back again, this time I need advice on Ice Armor. I tried (not terribly hard) to search this forum but I couldn't find anything really recent. I am not looking for someone to give me a build, but I am looking for someone to help me believe. What do I do to hit the defense caps? I know I can't possibly hit the resist cap. I was looking at mids and i am having a hard time believing. Its not so dire that I am going to reroll the character, but its looking a little rough. I got Frozen Armor that does def to smash/lethal. With 3 IOs i get to 26% def. I got Glacial Armor that does def to nrg/neg. With 3 IOs I get to 26% def. That is it. Wet Ice does 0.75% def and 22% rez to cold, but I can't enhance it. Energy Absorption can get me 5.65% def if I have 3 IOs AND hit max targets. Permafrost gives me 35% rez to cold and like 5.94% rez to everything else if I put in 3 slots, but should I? So with all 4 toggles on I am at 26.6% def to smash/leth/nrg/neg and 6.4% to everything. No positional. I am 90% rez to cold, 24.23% rez to fire and 6.64% rez to everything else. That ain't great. So what is the plan here? Am I not supposed to hit any defense caps and live off my slows and ice patch? Do I hibernate every fight? Can I get to where I need to be off set bonuses? I want to believe. Help me believe.

I am sad I just learned about this. I know its a moot point because the dev's aren't looking at T9 powers any more, but I feel I have something to say so I want to add my 2 cents. In reading the dev's notes on the changes I feel (remember, we have to use "I feel" statements, don't be accusatory) that the devs have spent so long thinking like devs that they forgot how to think like players. Of course we want to be unkillable for 3 minutes. It feels amazing when you hit Unstoppable and go toe to toe with Lord Recluse. We just don't want the crash. So take off the crash. Leave everything the same, and remove the crash. Who are we trying to impress? We don't need balance. But I get it. The game would turn into "City of Unstoppable" with everyone chasing how to get it to be perma. Unstoppable is meant to be the big anime power up. Its Super Sayin, Its 4th Gear, Its Sage mode. Its meant to be used when you have nothing left. No inspirations, your healer is coming back from the hospital, Dull Pain is recharging. You are about to die, so you hit Unstoppable. You are now unkillable as you wait for your friends to get back. It is your big last stand. You are supposed to die at the end, BUT now all you friends are back so you have time to get back on your feet. That is what its meant to represent and it does a great job at it. I can't speak to the other armor sets, but I do have a lot of experience with Invulnerability. I am the type of player who is down for anything. I'm not trying to tell the devs what to do. I loved Unstoppable. It was a big part of my build, and I would use it exactly as I described. We even had a running joke in my SG that when Unstoppable was about to wear off I would say "I'm about to drop Unstoppable" which meant they needed to back me up so I don't die. Then it became a whole thing about when is it appropriate to drop unstoppable, and how I shouldn't drop unstoppable in front of company. You know how it goes. Where were we? Oh yeah, We want Unstoppable to make us unkillable for 3 minutes, but we don't want the crash at the end, but we don't want it to become a perma thing and make the whole game trivial. Here is my suggestion. Make the T9 powers not affected by recharge. You can't slot recharge into it, it doesn't get recharge reduction from Hasten, it isn't affected by global recharge. Make it so the power can't be made perma. Its not something that is meant to be up all the time. Let it be there as your last resort. To me, that is enough.

It is 100% star aversion. There is a lot of pressure taking the star. Its assumed you know the mechanics inside and out and can tell everyone what to do. I wanted to run a Winter Realm but I wasnt about to try and form that league. I had never done it before. I posted once in LFG that I wanted to join one, got no response so I let it go. Eventually is saw someone wanting to start one up, which I joined super fast. Now that I have seen it and it really is "kill giant monster until other giant monsters show up then kill them until dead. Have second team kill everything that isn't giant monster." its pretty simple to run, but i had to see it first.

I'm level 10, so these numbers wont be terribly impressive. After looking at Mids it seems that Toxic Dart, Jump Kick and Flurry are the strongest tier 1 PP attacks. I used my second build to grab those to see what happens. Toxic Dart is cool, but with a little bit of Fury Flurry was doing 10 damage a tick. At the same level of Fury Jump Kick was doing 75. I think ima go with Flurry, I like the idea that each time I activate it the ticks do more and more damage. I may hate the animation lock down, especially when it misses, we shall see. I wont keep you updated. Granted, if they do change Ice Sword so I can take the sword off and its just a punch that does cold and lethal, this whole thought experiment is moot because I will just take ice sword again.

I just started an Ice Melee Brute, Never played Ice Melee before. I am really liking it. I played SS on live and real talk, SS is kinda lame. Other than Foot Stomp and Knockout Blow everything else is pretty wack ... but this thread isn't about SS. So I want to make my life difficult and not take either of the ice sword powers for thematic reasons. In looking at it this means I don't get a third attack until level 22. I might be able to make it work with the Ghost Slaying Axe and the Nemesis Staff, but do I want to? This lead me to looking at the Power Pool attacks. Kick, Boxing, Jump Kick, and Flurry. In looking them over it looks like Flurry is the best power of the bunch, but I know I will get locked into the animation. Which leads me to my question. How does Fury affect those power pools? I can see you typing the answer "it makes them better." Don't you do it. I will eat half of the keys on your keyboard if you type that. Does fury build with each punch of the Flurry so it ends up being amazing? Does Kick and Boxing end up being as good as a primary power? Are they all wack and I really just need to take Ice Sword? Inquiring minds need to know.

A kind, unnamed benefactor actually sent me a Winter Pack. Not enough Candy Canes to warrant 25m, but they are cool to open. Is there an in-game way to track what cards you got? I figured there has to be otherwise why number them? I like how the stuff you get can be claimed on any character. The enhancements are sitting on my mail until I figure out what to do with them.

I would love to buy winter packs but I am sitting on 20m and change, so I can't afford to buy a 25m winter pack. 😞

I know I can get 5 off doing Baby New Year, but after doing that 5 times for the badges I'd rather jump off the ski chalet than do it again. I mean, I will if I have to, but I am hoping there are better options. I then went out and collected about 20 presents. I ended up with 21 candy canes. That also is not a lot. On AH they are like 800k, which is way too much to just get some badges. So what say you? What is the most efficient way to go out and farm canes?

This is the thought experiment that we all have fallen into at one point in time. I know someone out there has done the math of how many different powerset combinations there are. Some people probably made all the characters, some other might even have leveled them all. Me, I just got bit by the bug and decided to figure out how many characters would it take to make one character of each powerset, with as minimal overlapping as possible. Short answer: 69. To start lets go to the Melee ATs: Tanker, Scrapper, Brute, and Stalker. There are 14 different armor sets and 23 different melee sets. One thing I found interesting is that all of the ATs share the armors except for Ninjitsu, that is only on Scrappers and Stalkers. They almost share all of the melee sets except for Super Strength, that is only on Tankers and Brutes. Stalkers are the only ones that get Ninja Blade, but the trade off is that they are missing 5 different melee sets. Lets get the easy sets out of the way, the elemental pairings. All 4 ATs get access to these. Dark Melee/Dark Armor, Electrical Melee/Electric Armor, Energy Melee/Energy Aura, Fiery Melee/Fiery Aura, Ice Melee/Ice Aura, Psionic Melee/Psionic Armor, Radiation Melee/Radiation Armor, Stone Melee, Stone Armor. That leaves us with the 7 “natural” armors and a lot of weapon/martial arts sets. First we have 3 one handed weapons that pair perfectly with Shield Defense: Battle Axe, Broad Sword and War Mace. Tankers, Scrappers and Brutes get access to all three. The obvious answer for Regeneration is Claws, Katana can go with Ninjitsu, Super Strength and Invulnerability is the classic combo, Martial Arts gets Super Reflexes, which leaves us just Bio Armor and Willpower and 8 melee sets. This is where overlapping has to happen. You can mix anything with anything but this is what I am going with: Dual Blades/Super Reflexes, Kinetic Melee/Willpower, Savage Melee/Regeneration, Staff Fighting/Super Reflexes, Street Justice/Willpower, Titan Weapons/Invulnerability. Which leaves us with Bio Armor. There is no symbiotic melee, or even elasticity melee. The only “weird” powerset left is Spines, which I guess can fit ... maybe? Also we have Sonic Melee being worked on. There is no Sonic Armor (yet). At this time the only thing that seems to fit is Psionic Armor (you can't spell Psionic without Sonic, amirite?). This is how I would break down what you would make for minimal overlapping: Tanker: Dark/Dark, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Ice/Ice, Psi/Psi, Rad/Rad, Stone/Stone, Inv/SS, Shield/Mace, Will/Street Scrapper: Sword/Shield, MA/SR, Spines/Bio, Claws/Regen, Katana/Nin, Titan/Inv Brute: Fire/Fire, Kinetic/Will, Savage/Regen, Axe/Shield, Blades/SR, Sonic/Psi Stalker: Ninja/Ninja, Staff/SR That is a total of 24 different characters but covers every powerset at least once, and you don't do the same powerset on an AT twice. Obviously you can make the elementals on any AT but I like Tankers. Now we have to get into the rest of the mess. It was fun to try and spread out the support powersets because those can go into Defender, Controller, Corrupter or Mastermind. Another interesting thing is that all of the ranged damage powersets are shared with all of the ranged damage ATs: Blaster, Defender, Corrupter and Sentinel. The real problem that kinda brought my whole thought experiment to a halt was Blasters and Dominators. Their secondaries are not shared with any other AT. They both have 15 secondary powersets, which means one has to make 15 Blasters and 15 Dominators. There are 15 ranged damage sets, sure, but only 12 control sets. The easy stuff for Blasters: Radiation Blast/Atomic Manipulation, Dark Blast/Darkness Manipulation, Seismic Blast/Earth Manipulation, Electrical Blast/Electricity Manipulation, Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation, Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation, Ice Blast/Ice Manipulation, Psychic Blast/Mental Manipulation, Sonic Attack/Sonic Manipulation, Archery/Tactical Arrow. This leaves one with 5 damage sets: Assault Rife, Beam Rifle, Dual Pistols, Storm Blast, Water Blast and 5 secondaries: Devices, Martial Combat, Ninja Training, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation. We can do the natural stuff with the natural stuff: Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistols/Martial Combat. But what do we do with Assault Rifle, Storm Blast, Water Blast, Plant Manipulation, Temporal Manipulation and Ninja Training? None of those go together. Still, we gotta make it work so Water Blast/Plant Manipulation, Storm Blast/Temporal Manipulation, and finally Assault Rifle/Ninja Training. It doesn't feel good, but we did it. Dominators are just as bad. Arsenal Control/Arsenal Assault, Darkness Control/Darkness Assault, Earth Control/Earth Assault, Electric Control/Electricity Assault, Fire Control/Fiery Assault, Ice Control/Icy Assault, Mind Control/Psionic Assault, Plant Control/Savage Assault, Symphony Control/Sonic Assault. This leaves us with 3 control powersets: Gravity, Illusions, and Pyrotechnic, which would be fine because we still gotta make some controllers, but we also got 4 secondaries: Energy Assault, Martial Assault, Radioactive Assault, and Thorny Assault. None of this stuff fits nicely so we, once again, gotta hand wave away some characters: Gravity Control/Energy Assault, Arsenal Control/Martial Assault, Pyrotechnic Control/Radioactive Assault, Plant Control/Thorny Assault. ew. With that out of the way we can go back to the fun part where we gotta spread out the support sets. We got 18 sets to spread out over 4 ATs. Cold Domination/Icy Blast, Electrical Affinity/Electric Blast, Marine Affinity/Water Blast, Radiation Emission/Radiation Blast, Sonic Resonance/Sonic Attack, Storm Summoning/Storm Blast. Those can be Defenders or Corrupters. Lets throw in some Masterminds: Beast Mastery/Nature Affinity, Ninjas/Trick Arrow, Necromancy/Dark Miasma, Demonic Summoning/Thermal Radiation, and Mercenaries/Traps. Those are the easy ones. The two hard ones are Robotics and Thugs. We could go Robotics/Traps as well, but then what would we do with Mercenaries? Instead we are going to go Robotics/Force Field. For Thugs I thought about Poison to represent what they are selling, but I decided to go with more enforced loyalty with Thugs/Pain Domination. Controllers have one specific support set in Darkness Affinity so we can easily pair that with Darkness Control/Darkness Affinity. This leaves us with 4 support sets: Empathy, Kinetics, Poison, and Time Manipulation. We also have one control set left to use in Illusions. Sadly Illusions does not really pair with anything. I would want some kind of Psychic Affinity. Instead we are going to go Illusions/Time Manipulation to stick with the mental aspect. Empathy, Kinetics, and Poison. Why is there no Empathy Blast? Poison/Radiation Blast, Empathy/Psychic Blast, and finally we end on Kinetics. Kinetics, the powerset that pairs with everything, and nothing at the same time. I had no idea what to do with kinetics so I just went with something to finish this thought experiment and free myself from having to agonize over spreadsheets and go with Kinetics/Electric Blast. With that, it was finished. Here is how I would spread them out: Blaster: Rad/Atom, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, NRG/NRG, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Psy/Psy, Sonic/Sonic, Archery/Arrow, Beam Rifle/Devices, Dual Pistol/Martial, AR/Nin, Storm/Time, Water/Plant Defender: Emp/Psy, Poison/Rad, Kin/Elec Controller: Dark/Dark, Ill/Time Corrupter: Ice/Cold, Elec/Elec, Water/Marine, Rad/Rad, Sonic/Sonic, Storm/Storm Mastermind: Beast/Nature, Demon/Therm, Ninja/TA, Robot/FF, Merc/Traps, Thugs/Pain Dominator: Arsenal/Arsenal, Dark/Dark, Earth/Earth, Elec/Elec, Fire/Fire, Ice/Ice, Symphony/Sonic, Plant/Savage, Mind/Psy, Grav/NRG, Mind/Martial, Pyro/Rad, Plant/Thorn That is 45 characters, with not one Sentinel in sight. Now I leave it up to the streets. How would you do it?

Oh, I had no idea. That's great. The last time I played MM it was not like that (in the before times). I figured with them removing the recharge timer it was to make equipping all of them faster. If it is already an AoE then removing that seem redundant. But hey, it doesn't hurt anything so im all for it.

I understand the idea of making the upgrade powers have no cool down. Makes upgrading all the pets less tedious. Why not just make the upgrade an AoE that upgrades all pets with one activation? I assume its because of something built into the code, but i figure if MMs are getting looked at now is the time to ask the question.

I think you are confusing negative opinion with being a jerk. People didnt get banned when they didnt like ED. People didnt get banned because they didnt like pvp changes. People didnt get banned because of the regen changes. There was a lot of times there were strong negative opinions in the game and the devs just took the feedback. People did get banned for being jerks, being insulting sure, but not for having an opinion.

Turns out making an MMO is hard. If CoH didnt exist Ship of Heroes might be something, but it does so SoH isn't necessary any more. Also their reactions makes one appreciate the professionalism of the original CoH dev team. Castle, Statesman and Positron and to deal with just as much vitriol yet they kept on working. No one got banned because they had a negative opinion.