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tidge

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Everything posted by tidge

  1. Who doesn't want MOAR SNIPING with Dehydrate!? (which can already take Range boosts, IIRC) I suppose there could be corner cases (for Heal/Range boosting) to be made for other ranged heals like Twilight Grasp or Regrowth (without just slotting Range for those types of powers). As I wrote, such a piece would be niche for me and my builds. I generally like what I can get from existing healing pieces, more range on any given power wouldn't do that much for me. MMV. I'll note this: I think the Medicine pool is overdue for a revisit. It wouldn't be terribly unbalancing IMO to allow its powers to take Range enhancements (directly).
  2. I disagree, specifically with respect to Tankers. I can completely understand why Fold Space seems appealing in theory, but in practice I don't recommend it. The number one issue I have with it for a Tanker is the opportunity cost of having to take TWO other powers from the teleport pool to get Fold Space. I guarantee that there is at least one better pick that can be made to make the tanker better at tanking, even if a player has chosen to invest in the Teleportation pool. I love Combat Teleport! My experience has been that if a Tanker takes CT, that they don't need to use Fold Space to be a good tanker! Of the other choices for pre-requisites, Teleport Target has to be slotted to be reliable (against single-target enemies) , and Teleport is the red-headed step-child of travel powers. These powers can hold some useful enhancement pieces, but that's making watery lemonade from lemons IMO. Number two among the reasons I dislike Fold Space is its base 2-minute recharge time. A Tanker can cast a whole lotta Combat Teleports and Taunts in the time it takes Fold Space to recharge and animate. Reason number three is the base 1.0 Accuracy. Any slots invested in Fold Space aren't going somewhere else in the build. Tankers can benefit from any number of single enhancement pieces, such as more Healing, more Resistances, more Recharge, more Recovery, more Regeneration, blah blah blah fishcakes, all that can come from single-slot investments in other powers. The power also requires a ToHit check, and has a target cap of 16. If the Tanker is having accuracy or ToHit debuffed. or is otherwise not reliably hitting all enemies, Fold Space becomes unreliable on top of being infrequently available. I should note: I give Warshades a complete pass for taking/using Shadow Slip. Warshades have a significant number of powers that would otherwise be quite bad if they didn't have a method of guaranteeing some extra enemies in close proximity. It doesn't mean that the power could be less annoying on a Warshade, but many Warshade players make it a regular part of their rotation and it is much easier to know in advance if I am playing with a Warshade.
  3. In the specific case of Heal/Range, it would be better to request a new Healing set that includes a Range-boosting component, because the heal powers can accept healing sets. It would be similar as to how Link Minds can only get Recharge benefits from the sets it can slot, but not from Hami-Os. Heal/Range would still be somewhat niche... I'm not sure I'd even consider it for something that requires an Accuracy check.
  4. The stockpiling FREEM (at x8 with lots of attacks, and +4 for better ToHit) was the number-one source of surprise for many Tankers. Without seeing the build, I'm head-scratching why an Invulnerable Tanker is having so much trouble. There is no good reason (IMO) for skipping (or delaying past level 30) choosing/slotting each of the Resistance Auto/Toggle powers, and with a Taunt and Invincibility there ought to be plenty of Defense in play. I can't predict when/if Dull Pain is taken, but I rarely use except in extreme content, but I have to believe that it was taken and slotted before level 30. FWIW, Dull Pain was the level 20 pick on my Invulnerability Tanker. I mention this because I recognize it is possible to delay more than one of the Tanker primary powers because they simply aren't needed at low levels. I definitely think that by level 32 an Invulnerable Tanker ought to try have the first 8 primary powers. That same Tanker delayed taking Resist Energies until level 28 and delayed Resist Elements until level 35 for quality-of-life reasons, so it's not like my guy is rocking the full suite of resistance coverage as soon at each is available.
  5. It doesn't bother me at all. The only slightly feels I have that are adjacent to being bothered is when an enemy group that needs to be defeated gets aggroed and strays, delaying mission completion.
  6. When Fold Space misses critters, the critters are now scattered. RNG contributes to misses (especially against +4 enemies) and +4 Bosses don't get teleported.
  7. I generally feel using Fold Space is somewhat 'Trollish'. On a large league Fold Space is almost certainly not necessary. What I find more trollish-than-not about Fold Space is that it rarely gets all of a spawn (and never level 54 Bosses), so it isn't protecting allies, and it feels really lazy for an event where the players are supposed to be moving to click on doors. During a ToT event, I see a LOT of players putting down debuff/damage patches, so tossing out Fold Space just because the player with it doesn't want to move to where the enemies actually spawn is a slowing down the DPS and defeats. If the player using Fold Space (or the equivalent) predictably uses the power in a circumstance that is obvious to all teammates... I guess that is fine. It's essentially a worse form of knockback for scattering enemies hither-and-yon.
  8. Frankly. I'm more surprised it took this long to get the change to the way the Banner credit (for defeat badges) is handed out. Hopefully the Elite Boss changes make some folks feel better. As @JKCarrier wrote above: it can be a real mixed bag fighting some of them.
  9. I think it depends on the nature of the Tanker, but I would almost always go for +Absorb first, because there aren't cascading Resistance failures, and at a certain point more resistance is only contributing to the debuffing of resistances (in a good way). By "first" I mean I'd put the piece I want to trigger in a regularly used AoE with a 15 second-or-greater base recharge. I'm sure you are also leveraging the Scaling Damage Resistance piece (quite important for Tankers) as well as the pieces that are %+Heal (Power Transfer's healing amount is superior to Panacea's healing for Tankers). I haven't played all Tanker primaries, but generally with solid HP and Scaling Resistance available the only thing I worry about is -MaxHP or a particularly bad damage type mismatch (or gameplay equivalent).
  10. Most of my targeted AoE have macros... my point is that if the team is moving quickly enough, it won't matter that a power like Tar Patch was placed in some other room. Another suggestion: If playing melee, invest in Combat Teleport, and use a macro to BAMF to the next target. /macro_image "E_Icon_Obliteration" "BAMF" "powexec_location target Combat Teleport"
  11. My experience with Dominators have been this: If a Dominator needs Hasten to be perma in order to perma-Dom, then the build with perma-Hasten almost certainly doesn't need perma-Hasten... because the window between enough recharge for both perma-Hasten and perma-Domination is such that Hasten needs more global recharge, even if most of that extra will have to dome from Hasten itself. In other words: A Dominator relying on Hasten for perma-Dom probably doesn't have to have Hasten actually be perma. Obviously there are things like enemy slows. It was mentioned above by @The Trouble that Hasten will eventually have to have its Endurance cost paid. For my Dominators (which don't rely on Hasten for perma-Dom) just having enough global recharge for perma-Dom means that my attacks/controls are getting spammed at a rate where the blue bar is almost empty by the time Domination fires, refilling the blue bar. I suppose I could have some alternate attack chain with Hasten in play, but then I'd almost certainly burn the entire blue bar and take eventually the hit from Hasten. I tend to think of perma-Hasten as a build trap. I definitely have at least one Dominator with Hasten as a late-level pick, specifically to address potential enemy slows/-Recharge. My other Dominators don't have that trouble, either because of other build choices or perhaps something about the controls those Dominators have or the way they are used. I also want to echo what other players have written about putting Hasten on perma-cast at the cost of not having another power on auto. Yes, I am aware of binds to alternate between different powers, but I find that to be a sloppy fix for what I consider to generally be poor build choices. There are a significant number of non-attack powers that work as clicks which are incredibly useful to have on auto. One such power that I always keep on auto is Inner Will from the Blaster Secondary Martial Combat. This is a power that can only be used in certain circumstances, so having it on auto allows my Blasters to keep on blasting. Sometimes it's triggered by some trivial short-duration control, but nonetheless it provides breathing room when I need it.
  12. Once a melee character has the attack chain slotted (with enhancement sets) things are much smoother. If you are committed to trying to achieve perma-Hasten, you will almost certainly be leveraging both Purple set bonuses and LotG... at which point you are likely to discover you don't need Hasten.
  13. Pretty much any AoE/PBAoE should be fine. AoE that require placements may yield suboptimal results, if the team really is "fast-moving".
  14. So you want them all to be lowered to a common value? Why?
  15. I disagree with the suggestion. I have plenty of non-Sentinels with a number of different ranges in attacks. My personal opinion is that Sentinels have some longer ranged single-target attacks (than their cones/what-not) to hit enemies that run away from them, not to snipe at a distance or do things like "hover-blast".
  16. I HAVE COME FROM THE FUTURE TO WARN YOU! THE COUNCIL CHANGES WERE REVERTED! BUT NOW EVERY TIME A COUNCIL BOSS DIES, THERE IS A 3 MINUTE CUT SCENE!!!!!
  17. Generally, the ATO and Winter %procs have such good proc chances (when catalyzed) that they can tolerate being included in even fast-recharging powers. This is convenient because those sets often offer decent set bonuses. I rather like the options that the set bonuses and %procs offer Tankers (from the ATO sets), I mix-and-match all sorts of ways with them.
  18. This was well-put. I was trying to think of a polite way to express how I got to the point where Hasten is one of the very last powers on the menu that I consider for any given build. I experimented with using the Force Feedback %+Recharge to cross into the 'perma-Hasten' regime... and while it works, it was more of a PITA to keep executing whatever power(s) than it was to not sweat if it wasn't perma. I used to think there were two in-play reasons to chase perma-Hasten, but I'm pretty much only down to (half of) one: The character must have an attack chain consisting of (pretty much) only longish recharge time attacks and needs absurd levels of global recharge to make that specific chain "smooth". I'm discounting this, because most ATs will end up having to take inherently fast-recharging 'attacks' at low levels... but I can imagine not wanting to add them to attack chains (even though many such attacks offer other benefits besides Damage). The second reason that I no longer bother with recommending perma-Hasten was for when a player had some signature power with such an extremely long recharge time. The problem that I see it is that such powers typically won't recharge faster than (perma) Hasten, so its like Hasten is the signature power... and Hasten won't do much more (in my general play experience), except for the case I mentioned above. (perma) Domination is sort of a special case, but most Dominators can get to perma-Dom levels of recharge without Hasten or the FF %+Recharge. For permaDom, its more (IMO) picking which build constraint you want to live with. It definitely was for me. Better to invest in refreshing SG base buffs to increase attack speed, IMO.
  19. This is definitely AT-dependent, and to a lesser extent dependent on the attack typing of the players' character. I've played on level 50 Tankers that were solo ToTing in Peregrine that simply dragged some Elite Bosses door-to-door because they'd take more time to defeat than a Giant Monster.
  20. My current project is Earth Control primary, partially chosen because of the character name/concept and partially because it is a set that I see, but only rarely. My chosen secondary was Cold Domination, so not nearly as rare to observe in the wild. It fit my concept better than any other.
  21. So they are teaming up, they are going to be two of them at x2. I agree that things should be a cakewalk; I'm going to step out of the recommendations here because if a player is playing a lot of alts, and none of them have gotten past 25, I kinda feel like the OP is playing the game a LOT differently than many of us. START was explicitly pointed out as something they wouldn't take advantage of.... so yeah, a solo controller without P2W attacks is going to be a little slow to complete content below level 16. With the sorts of written constraints and my own reading-between-the-lines, I feel like a grindy pre-16 experience is what is in store... and the likely issues are going to be burning through endurance and missing attacks (they can't turn off Beginner's Luck!). I feel like the "try a Controller" is not even the right way to attack this. If the desire to test a Controller was the main driver, I feel like the other member of the team wouldn't be a Brute. As I wrote above, I don't even think Brutes are the simplest to play for a youngster. If they are prone to get upset when getting defeated, a Tanker is probably better. If they can emotionally handle defeats, a Scrapper or Blaster will give the Controller more of a chance to shine, plus offer the dopamine hits of finishing enemies off. IMO, Controllers might be the AT that benefited most from the lowering of the levels for picking certain powers... but a player would have to go past level 25 to find out.
  22. I have it 5-slotted with 2x Acc/Dam/End 50+5 and three damage %procs. The Accuracy is needed for the %procs, it makes them surprisingly reliable. I only have damage boosted because there aren't cost-effective Acc/End reduction pieces. On a MM, if Shifting Tides was going to be 5-slotted I'd probably just go with 5xAnnihilation (and include the %-Resistance piece). 5-slots gets +MaxEnd, a global Endurance discount, plus the enhancement values in the power. %Proc rates may be hurt of course, but the AoE is quite large and it is a sort of set-and-forget AoE. If I was short of slots, I might go with just 3 (Acc/Dam/End and %-Res) on a MM, because it is the %-Resistance that really improves henchmen performance.
  23. The OP has said that they rarely take characters above level 25, and made comments that imply that they won't leverage "modern" (my words) slotting techniques. It also sounds (to me) that they basically want the child to be on "easy mode" (as a Brute) and the only admitted pre-conceived notion is that "Controllers are slow." My point about spamming the heal is made because the other low-level Dark powers have recharge times such that they won't be available for every fight, and it will likely be hard to tell (at low levels) how they are "controlling" the fights. This feels to me like there may be enough preconceived notions that I probably should check out of this thread. I wouldn't give a young, inexperienced player a Brute... I don't even think it's best (at low levels) for "blitzing" enemies. An inexperienced Controller would probably learn the introductory Controller tricks better by supporting a Scrapper or Blaster teammate.
  24. Controllers are great solo, but if you don't go beyond level 25 you are very unlikely to experience this. The 'classic' CoX experience for Controllers is slow, but that means ignoring START attacks, not slotting to address Endurance, single-target controls (Containment is supposed to help with damage) as opposed to DPS. Until powers can be cast in a chain, and you have AoEs, it is hard to see how Controllers are really shining. The most no-brainer Controller primary is probably Plant Control. You will be able to see Containment very early, and Seeds of Confusion is rather OP, especially for a level 8 power. If you quit at level 25, you will at least have been able to experience Carrion Creepers. If you want more direct damage with a side of Control, Gravity (provided you take Propel) will meet your needs. If you want to be the support, then the secondaries of Kinetics or Empathy will allow you to support the kid. Dark is great, but Twilight Grasp is something you might get bored with spamming.
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