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Redlynne

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Everything posted by Redlynne

  1. You have found a reason to use Teleport ...
  2. Try Energy Aura or Willpower paired with Kinetic Melee. You can thank me later.
  3. My sincere wish for Serum (for the Mastermind) would be that it becomes a 300s duration on a 300s recharge power that instead applies a Grant Power effect to the Medic ... so that it's the Medic who is handing out the Serum to all the Mercenaries to buff them (think Protector Bots and their Force Field bubbles). That way, it's kind of a "Medic Approved" buff to all of your Mercenaries that is doled out by your Medic along with the Stimulant and so on. That way, it's relatively fire and forget for the Player to deal with. You basically just delegate the distribution of the Serum to your Medic to give to all the Soldiers, Spec Ops and Commando.
  4. Mew C M Say it out loud to get the verbal pun that isn't obvious enough when it's in writing...
  5. It's a major stretch for me to reach that interpretation. If you hadn't mentioned it, that isn't what I would have been seeing.
  6. That usually means App Store if doing it as a standalone app. Just use the web version on your iPhone. So long as Safari can deal with it, you'll have it available for iPhone ...
  7. It's a huge wall of text because ... well ... there's a lot to unpack and explain if you want to figure out what I do (and why) so as to adapt the scheme to your own purposes. So the RTFM factor is kind of unavoidable, but I'd like to think that I give enough info to reverse engineer what I'm doing so that you can convert what you need to your own Mastermind. 💪
  8. The real problem with Mercenaries is that it was probably the FIRST Mastermind powerset that was built. Full stop. That means that what Cryptic Studios had "available" for being repurposed into the Mercenaries themselves was OLD LEGACY powers that had been used by Assault Rifle for Blasters and were basically the Tommygun attack powers used by a lot of Family and Mooks NPCs. Later on, Assault Rifle for Blasters (and Defenders, eventually) got a "tune up" to be less stupid with their animation times and recharge and so on ... but that update to the tuning of powers never extended to Mercenaries, which had to (polite cough) ... soldier on ... (ahem!) with their poor game design after everything else that came after them were designed much better. So the Mercs' attack powers are all OLD LEGACY powers that were meant for NPCs, where no one is going to mind if they underperform which have never been given a balancing pass to bring them up to par with the rest of the Mastermind primaries. In other words, the real problem with Mercenaries can basically laid at the feet of being first NEVER getting adjusted to match everyone else ... leaving them stuck with obsolete antiquated terrible attack powers that work "fine" for Foe NPCs (who tend to be more numerous so as to "make it up in volume" for their lack of individual firepower) but which land on absolutely abysmal breakpoints (that all break unfavorably away from Mercenaries being useful/effective in combat) ... and they have never even once received a balance pass to bring them up to snuff. Cryptic Studios never did it. Paragon Studios never did it. ... and now it's up to Homecoming to finally get around to doing it when they can find the ever scarce resource of Developer Time™ to do it. Personally speaking, I'm of the opinion that twiddling some of the recharge times on the OLD LEGACY obsolete powers along with basically DOUBLING the base damage of every damaging power that Mercenaries have(!) ought to be sufficient to bring them up to par with the other Mastermind primary powersets. That way, you would only be editing the excel spreadsheet parameters that govern what they're "allowed to do" rather than trying to reprogram all of their animations and deal with the huge can of worm that THAT would open for things to start breaking all over the place. Yes, it would mean that the OLD LEGACY obsolete animations would be kept, but at least they wouldn't all be AS SUBSTANDARD as they currently are. Point being, if you can "better balance" the animation to recharge times for the Mercenaries attack powers, so as to reduce idle time waiting for attacks to finish recharging, while simultaneously increasing the damage that each power delivers ... that then would cause a marked enough improvement in the damage output of Mercenaries to keep them from gnawing a hole through the bottom of the barrel like they've been doing ever since the release of City of Villains. After that, you basically just need to fix Serum into not being a Joke/Trap power that's a complete and utter waste of a power pick ... and you'll be good to go. I'm thinking that would be the simplest, cheapest and perhaps most effective way to "fix" Mercenaries so they aren't weighed down as badly by the legacy of their abysmally bad game design parameters that they got stuck with in the first place which have NEVER BEEN MOVED. Is it a "perfect" solution? No. Would it be an "adequate" solution? I'd like to think it would be ...
  9. Actually, you might want to instead create a thread in which the only purpose for people to post in it on the forums here is to file requests for Club delete actions by the creators of those Clubs. That way you've got an easy to access (and public) record in writing of the requests to. Think of it as being akin to the Report Typos thread, in that it's a repository for actions that need to be taken at some point (although not instantly).
  10. One thing that I think ALL OF US WANT for the web version is ... being able to link to the build via URL. Ideally speaking, if you've got the URL with the code hash built into the URL, the web version will just parse the URL into the build and pull up the completed build for you when going to the link. Kind of like how this works (although obviously a LOT more complicated!) ... LINK Basic idea here is that all you need to do is open the URL in a separate tab and you can view the build and flip back and forth to whatever post you're reading that references that build via that link which includes the necessary code hash to reconstruct the build on the web based planner.
  11. Looks PROMISING ...!! MORE PLEASE ...!!
  12. Et Tsoo, Brute? Pretty much ... although since a Stone/MA Tanker is not a Brute, I wasn't going to take the joke THAT far, but rather let anyone else draw the inference on their own. Now, if the character WAS a Brute, then totally.
  13. In my experience, Cold on its own will not be enough to keep Ninjas operational. I recommend Ninja/Time/Mace ...
  14. That's why I say it warrants more research and noodling around in the build planner (which takes TIME ... unfortunately). But it's precisely those kinds of "well that's odd..." moments that can potentially lead to new discoveries, rather than staying on the already well beaten track and doing the same thing(s) forever.
  15. /decline The Rikti are in Founder's Falls ... so there's no reason they can be there in Founder's but NOT in Peregrine Island. The other thing to remember is that most of the Rikti we see on the streets are transformed Lost who have become Rikti-fied ... meaning those are HOMELESS PEOPLE you're seeing in the streets of Peregrine Island in the form of (transformed into) Rikti. And I'm not about to believe that Peregrine Island will have NO homeless in the zone.
  16. Except that I was 6-slotting the two Summon powers, which can then be repurposed into 2 of the 3 attack powers that I was adding. And then if I reshuffle slots between the attack powers to align more to 5-slotting across multiple powers, instead of 6-slotting everything, then it's possible to have enough slots for all of those powers. This is true ... but only while those Pets have 1+ HP. However, Pets that are exterminated do not contribute additional DPS beyond what your PC can dish out personally. So what you assert is true, but conditional upon those Pets being able/allowed to continue adding more damage. But if they get defeated quickly then that opportunity is not as ... helpful ... as it might at first appear. So the real answer depends upon how long your Pets can be kept alive (and attacking). Maybe not, but I'm thinking it would be rather FUN to play ... and that's what's most important (to me, at least). Also, depending to the ... shape(s) ... of the powers getting used, there would be a variety of ways to surge types of powers for specific purposes/effects so as to adapt to the current situation and circumstances. Things like being able to lay down 2 cones and 2 target AoE grenade damage attacks to deliver a huge amount of damage in a shorter time frame would potentially be very helpful in somewhat granular time frames, as opposed to calculating damage delivery over an infinite time horizon to determine average damage output. But all of that is stuff that needs more research to get a better handle on the comparison analysis (as mentioned).
  17. So I had a ... peculiar thought ... yesterday, and opened up the build planner to have a look at it and started getting back some pretty funky answers that I'm going to need to spend more time investigating and noodling around with to see if it pans out to be a worthwhile alternative build choice. Basically, I wondered what would happen if I ditched the two Summons powers on a HuntsCrab and instead went for adding the ranged backpack attacks ON TOP OF the rifle ranged attacks. Yes ... this would mean weapon redraw when switching from backpack attacks over to rifle attacks ... but there's something really ... curious ... that happens to the attack chains and slotting by making this transition to a "blended" HuntsCrab configuration. But let me back up for a moment here to make the thinking about this idea more obvious for those people playing along with the home game version. One of the reasons for wanting to build a (pure) Huntsman with as much global recharge as you can fit into the build (while still adequately supporting other priorities for investments) is because a Huntsman on the Crab side of things can have up to 4 really long recharge powers ... Serum (your Dull Pain clone power) and the two Summons powers @ 35 and 38 for Spiderlings and Reinforcements ... and I suppose Aim (at 90s base) but that's not that big of a factor to build planning, all things considered. Everything else you'd be using is going to fall into the 30s base recharge or faster categories (Wide Area Web Grenade is 30s base recharge). However, if you ditch the Summons then the only really long recharge power you'll have is Serum ... with Aim again not being a controlling interest driving recharge considerations. At that point, relaxing how much global recharge you "need" to put into the build becomes an option, even if it means that Serum is no longer perma. The flipside to this is that the animations on the backpack attacks are really long compared to their rifle animation counterparts (arcanatime/recharge). Have a look: If you take Single Shot+Channelgun and Burst+Longfang and Heavy Burst+Suppression and add up their arcanatimes you get: 1.056+1.584 + 1.188+2.244 + 2.904+3.168 = 12.144s Throw a Frag Grenade into the mix (rifle or backpack, the only meaningful difference is that the backpack version does 3x the Knockback of the rifle version!) and you get: 12.144 + 1.848 = 13.992s 13.992 seconds to animate all of those attacks just once. So you're basically taking 14 seconds to animate those 7 attacks (4 single targets, 2 cones, 1 target AoE). That in turn means that if you're doing a repeating chain with no variations in it, you would only need to get the 16s recharge times under 10.824s so that Suppression could recharge in time to be repeated without needing to wait. 13.992 - 3.168 = 10.824 That means that the total recharge needed on Suppression then becomes: 16 / 10.824 = +47.82% With Mental Training adding +20% global recharge, you would only need an additional +27.82% global recharge from sets in order to be able to perma loop the above attack chain using each attack once (and that's assuming you don't wind up using Single Shot and/or Channelgun more than once per cycle to pad it out and not need ANY global recharge at all!). Add a Venom Grenade into the mix ... extending the animation time out to 15.84s(!!) ... and you basically don't need ANY global recharge (beyond Mental Training) for ANY of your attack powers other than Venom Grenade and Wide Area Web Grenade. And it ought to be a simple enough matter to get enough recharge enhancement slotted into Venom Grenade and Wide Area Web Grenade for them to recharge in under 16s so that you can use them too as a part of every "full" rotation of all of your attack powers. Now, one thing to be aware of is that the rifle/backpack versions of the Venom Grenade and Frag Grenade powers are essentially interchangeable with one another (animation and recharge times are the same, damage is the same, etc.), but they are mutually exclusive of each other. So you can have only ONE Venom Grenade and ONE Frag Grenade ... not both of each. You can't "double dip" on the grenade powers at all. Beyond that, the only difference is that the backpack Frag Grenade delivers (as previously mentioned) 3x the Knockback of the rifle Frag Grenade power. So the easiest way to think of it is that you can only have ONE of each of the 3 Grenade powers (and Wide Area Web Grenade is a rifle only attack power), while the remaining single target and cone attack powers you CAN take BOTH and use BOTH within the same build. This then means you can have: Single Shot (r) Channelgun (b) Burst (r) Longfang (b) Heavy Burst (r) Suppression (b) Venom Grenade (r) -OR- Venom Grenade (b) Frag Grenade (r) -OR- Frag Grenade (b) Wide Area Web Grenade (r) That is NINE total attack powers! NINE! Point being, when you've got THAT MANY attack powers, especially if they're all slotted up, you don't NEED a huge pile of global recharge in order to make a repeating attack chain out of them ... and if you don't need a lot of global recharge to make your attack powers flow smoothly, what DO you need a lot of global recharge for? Answer ... Serum and Aim ... if you don't have Summon Spiderlings or Summon Reinforcements. So the experiment basically involves loading out a HuntsCrab with NINE attack powers, turning global recharge into a "dump stat" for the build and just going in a completely different direction than the stock 'n' standard Huntsman needs all the global recharge build plan. It's one of those cases of discovering what looks like a new island of stability beyond the explored map of what we already know that could possibly yield an entire new set of enticing possibilities for how to play a HuntsCrab as an alternate build. The possibility that has ME most intrigued by all of this is the potential of putting a Decimation proc into Longfang, where it will have the highest possible proc chance, and then routinely following that up with Suppression, Frag Grenade and then Heavy Burst for a seriously HEAVY force multiplier effect from the Decimation Build Up proc via THREE AoE attacks (2 cones, 1 target AoE), since EVERY $Target hit while the Build Up proc is active would receive the damage buff ... and you only need to activate a power before the 5.25s buff duration expires for the buff to apply to that power. This would in turn mean that although the Build Up buff duration is only 5.25s ... Suppression and Frag Grenade have a combined arcanatime of 3.168+1.848=5.016 ... so you still have 0.234s after Frag Grenade to activate Heavy Burst and STILL gain the benefit of the Build Up proc for the entire animation time of Heavy Burst. So even though Suppression+Frag Grenade+Heavy Burst has a total combined arcanatime of 7.92s, it is possible to have the 5.25s Build Up proc from Decimation apply to all three powers due to the timing of their animations. So ... yeah ... there would seem to be some opportunities in a HuntsCrab build that turns global recharge into a "dump stat" for the build in order to focus on 9 attack powers plus the auto/toggle powers of the secondaries, blended with the Leadership toggles and the additional pool(s) of choice ... in order to make an offensive attack chain that can hybridize single target and AoE attack powers with ease and play as a real powerhouse attacker. This would seem to be worthy of more inquiry. The only real "loser" in the switch (as far as I can tell) is ... Serum stops being perma. Oh well ...
  18. It is pronounced (and spelled) ... Murr'kha!
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