Crysis

I've been very happy with Victory Rush for leveling purposes. I'd respect out of it at 50 when you can slot purples, Catalyze stuff and get your Incarnates up and running. But as a leveling tool since I'm already pretty deep into Leadership on most toons, it works fairly well even just two slotted with normal ENDMOD IO's. You just have to be sure to target dead bosses, and +2 or greater is a very noticeable +Recovery bonus -AND- an Endurance Discount buff. If you have high recharge, which you WILL with /Storm (put Force Feedback +Recharge procs into Gale, Tornado and Lightning), you'll find it is up and ready for use fairly often. Just a thought to save you some slots/pool picks.

This is well said. And exactly the issue I had with Demons/TA. My Demons could take care of themselves more or less, but I could do very little to help them along other than twang twang twang piddly debuffs. It's just not a fun set (for me anyways) and not a very effective set relative to just about all the other secondaries available to a MM.

I’ve taken it on a few AT’s now, and have found it highly useful pre-Ageless for END hungry characters, particularly when soloing. It’s a decent one-slot wonder, although if you can give it two END mods it works even better. I do not keep it once I get Ageless for obvious reasons, but as a leveling tool it’s actually pretty decent if you’ve already gotten the rest of the Leadership trio. Vengeance is clearly not useful to a soloist. There’s a few guides running around that recommend taking it for END hungry builds as a leveling tool as well, which is where I got the idea. Part of the issue with so many builds posted is that they are ALL Incarnate builds that rely on many sets you can only slot (or Catalyze) at lvl 50. So while they work great for the endgame, you’ve got a long road to get there. To me, Victory Rush and Vengeance are both “road to 50” powers, useful for aiding that purpose. I view medicine pool much the same way, although generally respec out of it by level 40.

Have a DP/SR/Ninja Sent currently at 45. This toon unfortunately followed my Fire/Rad Sentinel and it feels sooooo much weaker overall. I may shelve it until the Sent changes are implemented by the devs. It’s very durable but the damage is just abysmal. I’m also annoyed that the Ninja sword animations remain invisible. So the overall style the “matrix” theme should have is borked by an invisible sword.

I really thought that Demons and the -RES of poison and gas arrow would synergize better than they actually did. For MM’s I think the -RES is around 15%, which isn’t trivial (stacked) but really not enough to make a big difference in actual play. Beyond that you’ve got...oil slick. The issue isn’t Demons, it’s Trick Arrow. Ironically the best combo I’ve found for /TA MM’s is Bots/TA, because of all the burn patches. But I can’t think of a more thematically incompatible build. Ninja/TA has some synergy but lolNinjas.

On a Thugs/Storm with a bunch of +Force Feedback Chance for Recharge procs it’s not that hard to get the Recharge up at all.

Yeah, my experience as well. Honestly, very few of my MM's (and I've got over a dozen) have any kind of mezz protection outside of breakfrees. I think that's sort of the point of a MM....your henchman are doing most of the work so even if you get mezzed, you just wait for it to wear off and keep on trucking. But that's also why I'm such a big advocate of softcapped +DEF vs Resists, I don't have to get mezzed at all if I dodge everything.

Tested and now that Bots will reliably engage from range I no longer have to use TP Self to hyper-engage the spawns in a tankermind sort of way. Loving this change!

All I’ll share is that my Demons/TA MM was the only AT on Live I ever took to 50 and then fully IO’d and T4’d out.....and then deleted in disgust. Nothing I tried would really improve the set. It’s likely the weakest combo I’ve ever played. Thematically it all worked. But the TA power set for MM’s is very watered down. Procs in HC may augment it better now but it left such a bad taste in my mouth back then I’ve never looked back.

Plainguy, I have read and learned much from a lot of your posts. But you’ve said here repeatedly that the issue you have is once mezzed “the pets do nothing.” I’ve never really had that experience. I run Bots/Time, Thugs/Time and Thugs/Storm high recharge/softcapped DEF builds all the time. I get mezzed on occasion. It’s rare given my +DEF but it does happen. But my pets keep right on following the last command given in those situations. It could be because they are set on Defensive Follow most of the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a time when they just....stopped doing anything....when I the MM am mezzed/stunned/whatever. I lose the ability to do anything until I break out of it but they don’t. Maybe it’s a matter of game mechanic timings but you’ll see in the video that was just posted the MM gets mezzed/stunned frequently. The Bots keep doing their thing regardless. Also, FX may be set on minimal, but I don’t think player is even using Hurricane.

This has to be the nicest, most gentrified way I’ve ever seen someone saying basically “liar, liar pants on fire.” This should be in the PVP forums. Actually I’ve enjoyed the back and forth here a ton. Just wanted to say I didn’t find any of this discourse derailing the topic. Bots are Bots and Storm is Storm. Slotting is never really a big secret out there....anyone can do anything they want and test for themselves. I always a learn a lot from creative discourse. That’s why the forums exist in the first place. Thanks to both of you for remaining civil.

Thanks! I never would have been looking there!

For Midnight Blue, what face mask is that? I can't seem to find it?

^^These are both great and gives me good starter material. Thanks for taking time to share!

I can find some info on Dual Blades for Scrappers, and certainly some stuff on /Ninjitsu secondaries. But there seems to be only one or two threads on a DB/Ninjitsu scrapper, and none of it really touches on any build information. Is this a bad combo? If not, can anyone offer a build as an example? I can certainly cobble one together in MIDS from Katana/Ninjitsu and the various DB/Bio and DB/WP sets I've seen, But I always learn from looking at what others have done before me. Anyone have a build they can share?

Well the fire melts the ice sooooooo.....

The farming community has been saying go for Banished Pantheon for some time now, at least for fire farms. Now you can see why.

They unlock on the menu after you do the Neutropolis event in Praetoria. But as for hidden emotes I also just discovered the Fireworks emotes. Fun if you run Trials and need something to signal to new players where to assemble, location of doors etc.

I always carry a bunch of envenomed daggers just for her type.

Haven’t tested yet but didn’t Brute damage cap get nerfed as well? The only time I really hit that damage cap sustained on my brutes is during farming.

A Fire/Rad sentinel, even with moderate +Res slotting, will show 75% Res to S/L and several other types once you activate Meltdown. With Barrier I think everything but Psi hits 75%. Just pull up Combat Attributes window and you’ll see it.

I never played on SCORE server but from all the video clips and data released at the end, it looked like a pretty small active community. Which sort of makes sense when you look at our explosion of population right when Homecoming opened up the servers relative to now. That’s only been 6 months and we are substantially lower now than back in April/May. So after SCORE had been operating for years in secret, they weren’t that populated either. Nonetheless, I think even at an active player population of 100 players, against a weekend crowd of maybe 3X that, this game could still work. Not financially but from a playability perspective. I agree with the above poster who said the one thing that prevents total solo play are the AV’s. I have built several toons that can solo AV’s, albeit some with great difficulty.

Somebody has never seen “Kick Ass 2” have they? A team of Vigilantes isn’t much different than a team of Thugs. It’s all in the intent. Regardless, I tend to not view my henchies as additional players. I view them as non-durable weapons. Use them till they wear out than summon more. In fact, I saw a MM the other day named “Excessive Turnover” and I cracked up at their bio. Basically they were a Human Resources exec gone Vigilante and would just burn through their employees. I will admit that MM themes for Thugs and Merc’s, to me anyways, work best if you don’t try to take things TOO seriously. Bots, Demons, Ninja’s, Beasts....you can come up with serious toned themes easily, everything from Johnny Socko to coven witches. But for Thugs and Mercs I tend to go ultra caricature of the “evil villain” or the “hapless vigilante” route.

I now have five lvl 50 Sentinels. Your statement is true in that once T3/T4’d out, EVERYONE gets really good at high levels. But I don’t see this any differently for any of my Sentinels. I really would appreciate a buff, but I’m starting to think I don’t need it. I routinely run my Sentinels on +4x8 content and steamroll far faster by myself than 50% of my other alts with similar incarnate power sets. Heck, on my Fire/Rad/Fire Sentinel I didn’t even need incarnates to do +4x8 quickly from around 48 onwards. My Beam/Bio, DP/SR and others aren’t quite as powerful, but they are still right up there with my top 7 alts. My only issue is the lack of melee attacks. I’ve got armor, I’m gonna tank, I’m gonna be in melee. Give me a couple of melee attacks, swapping out one or two of my ranged attacks for same if needed.

There is a form of first person story in the way of content linkage in the game, so I could see myself playing the game solo for some time if necessary. But the game world will suffer greatly if mine is the only voice heard in the streets. The AI is so routine based and repetitive that much of it would become depressing very quickly. I’ve hosted other private servers for dying games before, for my friends and I, and eventually we all notice the lack of a game world to talk about. “Did you see what that one player X was doing????” Or similar. PUG’s are part of the fabric of the game world. They die, and no matter what you try to do to keep it alive, the game becomes a shell of the experience it otherwise could have been. Now having said all this....SCORE kept the game alive, in secret, with fairly low player populations. So there’s that....