Crysis

Well we are playing two different Meta’s then, because I’m finding it’s far more common now with everyone carrying around Fold Space and/or Bonfire (or both) that herding is now back in ‘vogue’ so usually you’ve got one/two players pulling the entire room to a chokepoint via aura’s (seldom tankers these days) and/or warping fresh kills into the pile from nearby spawns. If we have one player running ahead of the rest of the team constantly, it’s usually on a PuG.

If you are leapfrogging ahead of the team then you are more soloing within a team than being a team player, aren’t you? I’ll go run some Pylons between the two builds. I’ve never done the Trapdoor thing.

Yes, I was being inflammatory and hyperbolic. As far as Storm Blast goes, it was released as-is -despite- a lot of really creative and insightful playtesting feedback in the Focused Feedback thread. I tested it, many others tested it, and it’s a gorgeous set with incredible FX and with an “interesting” mechanic that basically forces you to blast like crazy and ignore your secondary/tertiary attacks almost completely to get any kind of acceptable damage. And most of that is back loaded, meaning it totally ignores how the 40-50+ game is played via steamrolling teams. For the Sent class, the only logical way I could see ever taking Storm Blast -besides for meme/theme builds- is with a secondary that either has a damage aura or likely Bio with some ways to passively amplify your damage. It’s just a really underwhelming mechanic. Hyperbole -NOT- intended, I have a Storm/Storm/Dark Corruptor build on Test right now where I dropped Storm Cell and Cat 5 entirely….the two set defining (albeit poorly IMO) powers- and took Cross Punch and Whirlwind, both procc’d out. I’m seeing spawn clear times of >40% faster now solo with those two changes. Which at that point means…why am I taking Storm Blast at all? I may try to setup a Storm/Bio Sent on Test and do likewise. But my expectations are quite low beyond thematics (again, gorgeous) because Sentinels are still fundamentally underpowered versus almost any other builds for the same investment of powers, slotting and enhancements.

I’ve made several changes to the original build I posted and don’t forget I run with Defense Amplifier as I’ve got stacks of those things. That way I don’t have to chase wonky slotting for softcapping. Here’s what new build looks like:

Which in the cast of Category 5 means you’ll be able to drop your T9 nuke really fast and -almost- equal another Sentinel dropping their T9 nuke ONCE. Because of how the damage is back-loaded, and even with that penalty, you aren’t rewarded by getting a higher damage T9 or larger radius or anything. Taking Storm Blast on a Sentinel makes almost no sense for me. You take an AT that already has lots of opportunity for improvement and cripple it with a new blast set that really was designed around a solo player as most of it’s best powers don’t work on steamrolling teams and you have basically a door sitter who moves from mission to mission.

I’m at 44 now, working towards a modified version of the build I posted above which will have softcapped DEF for Ranged, Melee, Energy and NE. High Melee defense is -realllllly- useful for jumping into the spawn after I’ve already knocked them on their asses with Freezing Rain and pulling off a Soul Drain for my mini-Fulcrum. With such crazy high +recharge I’ll likely skip Burnout entirely and just take Tactics or something. Endurance isn’t much of an issue now that I’ve got Dark Consumption fully slotted out. This is a chaotic build, but I put an SD Knockdown proc into Jet Stream as it wasn’t helping me to keep things in my storm patch. I’ve toyed around with totally respeccing out of that power since it’s a basic clone of Gale, but realized it’s actually more useful than Gale as it feeds into the whole mechanic of the Storm Blast set. That said, I agree with a lot of the testers than Cat 5 is a bit of a head scratcher. A T9 “nuke” that does almost all of its damage at the end of its duration rather than up front? Steamrolling teams don’t even stick around enough for it to be useful. Solo, it’s even questionable as to its utility. I may (gasp!) respec out of it completely. With high recharge you just won’t find it very useful for spawn clearing. It’s a very creative mechanic for sure, but looks like someone did it to be cute and didn’t even consider the meta of this game is steamrolling teams. If your nuke isn’t clearing the spawn quickly, it’s -not- a nuke. It’s a wasted power pick. I think what we are seeing with this blast set is the issue with development and testing with such a small user base. Most of the Beta testers did their testing while SOLO, not teamed. That’s the nature of having such a tiny user base. And I’m sure the developer did most of their design around a solo mindset as well. As-is, the powers work really, really well for a SOLO player. At 40 I was already soloing +3/x5 and while I tended to solo more at the +2 level, I wasn’t taking much damage at +3…just whiffed more frequently. But all my powers worked really well solo because I could play tactician. It’s almost like playing a MM really solo….you control the powers being used and you can dominate the battliefield as long as you don’t pull too much aggro. But teaming? Good luck with anything but blasting and getting a LS or Tornado out for a Storm/Storm. I have to be into the thick of the spawn really fast for Soul Drain but after that stuff dies too quickly for your reverse-nuke to even come into play. It’s literally my least-used power when teaming, compared to all my other Corruptors where my Nuke is used as often as its up. As-is, Cat 5 is basically a severely gimped form of Blizzard…..in a nursing home…on crutches….loaded with painkillers. Honestly, I have a build on Test server right now where I’ve swapped out Cat5 for futhermucking CROSSPUNCH procc’d out and you know what? I’m actually FAR faster at killing stuff than I was with my T9. And if I’m not taking C5, it really makes me reconsider keeping Storm Cell in the mix, which is a set-defining power. And if I’m not keeping either of those….why am I taking this new blast set again on a Corruptor? Maybe a Sentinel? No wait….Sentinels as an AT need so much damn work this would be even worse. I dunno gang…..really thinking that unless they nerf a whole bunch of other powersets to bring them down to this level, this is a meme/theme powerset only.

I just sell these things, which makes them a decent perk but I typically get more for PVP recipe than I get for the Prismatics.

I think you could go with either an “Offender” build or a Corruptor build, with all the old arguments pro/con one or the other pretty much boiling down to playstyle preferences. Since I’m playing with a perma-SoulDrain build (or darn near it with all the +Recharge procs going off), I wanted the higher damage cap of a Corruptor. It would be easier on a Defender to cap out your Defenses and you get some nice bonuses on your debuffs. But given how much a Storm/Storm is dealing a ton of collateral damage from several small DoT powers -and- the foe is just pretty much flopping around helpless while they are whittled down by scourge damage…just seemed like a perfect fit for a Corruptor. Now I will say if it was pairing something like Kinetics or Time with Storm Blast, I’d likely look a little harder at the Defender setups. The benefits from additional buffs likely shift things in favor of a Defender.

All /Stormies will have some END issues. There’s plenty of ways to mitigate that, and once you have Dark Consumption and later Ageless your END issues evaporate. Until then there’s Recovery Serum and smart slotting like the PerfShifter +End in LS…with that you actually -gain- End with every cast of the power. After more than a dozen Stormies of varying builds you just learn to manage it.

Newest version of MIDS has a jacked up Forum build export. They are aware. **Edit** OP, upload your build as an attachment and I'll take a look. A couple of suggestions I found to get me to Ranged softcap: +Artillery 6-piece in both Cat5 and Storm Cell +Sting of the Manticore 5-piece in Direct Strike +6-piece Gaussian in Intensify That plus some other set bonuses from the 3-slot Thunderstrike in Hailstone and the 2-slot Zephyr's in SuperSpeed and you'll get to Ranged Softcap. With Agility, you'll softcap Melee also. I have stacks of Defense Amplifiers that also gets me another 10% through later game until you get Agility...you don't need them past that point unless you want them. Here's how mine looks...and again, props to Darkir for the template. This is a cheap build really, outside of the ATO's and the one Winter set. Once you T3 out your Incarnates, you can swap in some purples if you want more damage but given Soul Drain is near perma you likely won't need them.

New MIDS forum export is all jacked up, but here's the build. Based off of Darkir's older Water/Storm/Dark build. I used Defense Amplifiers since I"m sitting on a boatload of them. Storm_Storm_Dark_Build_PropstoDarkir.mbd

.....aaaand, its released!!!! http://midsreborn.com/

Per the Mids Reborn Discord, there's a chance the newest build will be out sometime today.

Pretty sure we will see Proc's getting a "Global Proc Nerf" at some point anyways. The key to the set really should be +DMG and +RCHG. That's why Storm/Storm/Dark is so damn attractive. Storm/Kinetics/Dark maybe even moreso.

I have a modified “Rambo” build, a AR/TacArrow blaster. I leveled her to T4’d incarnates first year of Homecoming. Since it’s a Rambo build, you really stay away from “super powers” beyond Tough/Weave. I really enjoyed pulling her out of mothballs and trying the new cone on FA as well as the changes to other AR powers. I only wish the Munitions pool would get an update.

Yeah yeah yeah....I read MOST of the storyline LOL.

Bored a bit today, I ran Number Six's Arc in RWZ. I mean I usually don't even read the storyline, but this one was really well done. Your reward...the thankful citizens erect a FREAKIN' STATUE of your character and cheer it on. Then, you get to play as Positron Anti-Matter for the epitaph mission where he...well, I won't spoil that for anyone. But seriously, well done on this one! I actually felt "heroic" for a bit!

You can somewhat expect Demons/Dark and Thugs/Time to play similarly in that both /Dark and /Time offer heals and -TOHIT. Beyond that, Demons are definitely more about +RES whereas Thugs are +DEF thanks to stacked leadership buffs. For Thugs, you add on Farsight (particularly Powerboosted Farsight) and you’ll find it really easy to softcap +DEF yourself and your henchmen too with Thugs. I find Demon attacks to be more effective at higher levels than Thugs, particularly with the -RES to provide effectively higher damage, plus less resisted damage types from Demons. But honestly, by 50 and after, especially with Incarnates, they don’t play that much differently. Playstyle, it’s a bit easier to MM the Demons from range, whereas with Thugs/Time, you may as well jump into the spawn with the Brute because your Times Juncture is your -TOHIT debuffer. I take Cross Punch from fighting pool for all my Thugs MM’s specifically for this reason.

I have to admit…using ChatGPT to create 1023 character bio’s is stupidly easy now. Really, there’s zero reason for someone to not have a decent bio. I’ve been having fun feeding it my own ‘homebrew’ bios and asking it to generate similar ones. Some are actually -much- better than what I originally intended. I’m also enjoying using it for creating appropriate superhero names by feeding it my powers and a little bit of the bio.

I can't imagine buffing Demons or Thugs any further. I -can- expect them to not be nerfed, but rather, watch powers that turn them into OP get nerfed instead. Gang War, Hell on Earth....yeah, gonna get their timers 'addressed' I'm betting. Or the number of pseudo-pets they spawn diminished. But honestly, I suspect Farsight's +DEF won't last beyond PowerBoosts' duration. /Time has always been really good with just about any henchmen sets. But PB+Farsight, with both being perma'd (or near it) pretty much is just asking for a nerf bat. Take that away and you'll effectively nerf a bunch of henchmen +DEF.

I read an article recently (I'll like it if I can find it) that showed that the average, as in NOT top-10 mobile game STILL brings in anywhere from 15-20X the revenue of the top selling console games AND almost all of the top 10 PC games -COMBINED-. I don't enjoy most mobile games. I don't play most mobile games. But they sure do seem to dominate the gaming industry now.

At lower levels...heck, sometimes at higher levels if you are soloing....you really have to learn how to pull so you can keep your henchmen in a tight little ball and just lure the numbers of opponents they can handle around a corner to ambush them. This is where the various MM keybinds become really helpful. Put your pets on Stay/Passive around a corner, you run in and aggro some baddies, then come back to the henchmen murder ball and flip them to Defensive or Aggressive. You'll seldom lose any pets doing this, although it can be tedious. But on some maps where the spawns are so close together you otherwise have a difficult time because you+pets pull too much aggro. Honestly, having played dozens of MM's to 50, I consider the keybinds to be -the secret- to playing the class effectively and keeping everything alive. It's critical and too few players understand that aspect of the AT.

There was a time when I believed that state of the art really prevented superhero movies from being a “thing” since all the sfx would look campy. MCU and others have proven we have the ability now to pretty much put anything on the screen we would like to see. So that’s no longer a limitation in film or in games. So if the capabilities are all there to do it, but nobody does it, has to be some product marketing guru running around killing superhero games with tons of market demographics stating that the genre just won’t make money. It’s the only obvious reason. For me, I’ve come to the realization that MMO’s in general have “moved on” from PC gaming to consoles and, perhaps even moreso, to mobile gaming devices. Free-to-play was a reaction to micro-transactions and those were all pushed by explosive growth in mobile gaming. So, we are re-living “the good old days” simply because there are no other options.

You probably have the right of it. But I just saw the work effort produced by Cryptic with ST Online and thought “Hmmm, y’all were -capable- of much more with CO than you actually produced,” and always wondered if there were some restrictions holding back the CO design and dev teams because of their prior work with/exposure to IP now owned by others (NCSoft, Microsoft for the ill-fated MU Xbox game, etc). There’s a lot of IP that never gets fully exploited in the marketplace but not for lack of interest, more for lack of legal right to exploit it.

Sorry but by “players” I meant the development teams behind both COH and CO were the same. Im referring to Cryptic Studios. 1) Develop and launch COH at a time when the entire MMO landscape was all fantasy based except for some scifi one-offs. 2) Signed on with Microsoft to take on a Marvel version of their game. That got scrapped. 3) Go out on their own to build CO. But since it was many of same team at Cryptic behind all three efforts, they likely had non-competed, non-solicitation and confidentiality clauses from prior efforts. Their best ideas were already owned assets by other parties by this time. Thus CO got watered down due to legal constraints. I might be wrong but always felt that played a role in CO’s limitations. The Cryptic dev team was limited and their new game reflected that.