MJB

its to create a more balanced environment for people with less time they are willing to spend gearing up a toon. the jet packs seem innocent enough, but there are several other buffs that give significant advantages to those who get them, things like tf buffs, mayhem buffs, super group buffs, cathedral of pain buffs, warburg nukes, all of the summons that you can get, etc etc. essentially everyone would have the choice of pve-ing for 3 hours for every hour they want to pvp, or being at a disadvantage to those who do. so, all non arena (pvp) temp powers were removed from pvp zones, as this was a flag that was already in the game so was easier than going through and vetting every single temp power to see what was and wasn't worth limiting

@mjb @Tempty why are sentinels, warshades, veats, mm's and scrappers banned? who made up these rules?

hoarfrost is pretty weak on blasters because its recharge is way too long. If you are going ice mastery its generally for hibernate and not much else this probably isnt the right forum for this though... im sure there are better threads to be asking for build help, or use the pvp discord

When you slot healing/absorb io's in sound barrier in the new blaster secondary, it barely changes the absorb values, only going from around 25 absorb unenhanced to around 50 absorb with enhancements at maximum stacks at level 50. Compare this to wild fortress from plant manipulation where after enhancements you are 100+ unenhanced, and getting 200+ absorb enhanced at level 50. I notice that the info on wild fortress has a line about absorb that is absent from the info of sound barrier too: on another far more minor note, it appears that the "bright sonic attack" costume setting for sound barrier is being mislabelled as "show floaters":

ive tried to play back a few demo's and none of them have worked, but ive also only spent about 5 minutes trying

Mids doesn't show any form of pvp DR. Unfortunately perma hasten is impossible in pvp (iirc you need about 600% pre-dr recharge bonus, which is over the recharge cap)

minor thing but my resume_info.txt no longer seems to be working 😞

https://discord.gg/grbegga this one should work, i set it to never expire but we'll see if that holds true i suppose

can we get some clarification on this? i am assuming you dont instantly forfeit the match if you accidentally jump cancel for example

when they don't have barrier? waaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy

but i wanna play my scrapper 😞

my scrapper has 1 melee attack (the default), can i play it in the ranged group?

@Tempty - emp/psi defender @MJB - beam/dev blaster will change comp a few hours before the event

you have neatly cherry picked pretty much the only example where animation cancelling macros do actually increase the skill ceiling massively (re-targeting after bfr/shout/whatever), however you neatly ignored the fact that pretty much no one actually does that because why would you when there are far easier ways to do way too much damage. you also neatly missed out people skipping the animation for blazing bolt, which i know you and your team dont tend to use anymore, but pretty much every other team still relies on it for a serious chunk of their damage. however as many people have pointed out, animation cancelling is in fact of marginal benefit to offence in 8v8s, however for emp/support characters it absolutely reduces the skill gap. i would go as far as to say that the biggest contributor to kill scores being lower now than they were 6 months ago isnt actually jaunt, but more emps using animation cancelling macros (i can absolutely see the argument for this being a good thing, but i disagree in the method of achieving lower scores). it used to be that positioning yourself not only to get a heal off on target on time was a skill, but positioning yourself so that you can do a followup heal was too, now the latter is completely trivialised by pressing 1 button with no downsides. on top of that it used to be a risk to buff people in between spikes, as the root might get you too far away from your teammates as they chase someone, now this is entirely not a problem. i remember commenting often that every time i would fort someone, someone on my team would die because i was then out of position. imo, this made me a bad emp, good emps never seemed to have this problem, now i press 1 button and one of the distinguishing factors between me being bad and good players being good is no longer existent. hell its gone far enough that now it is perfectly normal to just throw out spirit ward on someone you think might be the next target, with absolutely no downsides to doing so. i dont feel like im exaggerating when i say a team with emps cancelling their every animation has a massive advantage on one that doesnt, it doesnt make up for everything (you still need to be on time for the first heal after all) but it absolutely reduces the skill gap between good and bad emps, purely by adding 1 button to your tray, no downsides. its gone far enough that emps are now almost expected to also do more than just heal/buff, like playing a semi disruption role throwing out confuses and thunderous blasts, or helping the offence by throwing out ssj on target to hold spike people, and they can always do this while easily still being on heal target. it used to be just the good emps that could pull off such feats, now its normal. and all of that is completely ignoring the fact that there is more to pvp in this game than just 8v8s, i understand that its pretty much the only format you are interested in, but this isnt the "8v8 rules forum". i mean theres a 2v2 tournament happening soon, you may not care about it, i dont know, but i know of quite a few people who are quite looking forward to it. i honestly cant see an argument for how animation cancelling doesnt trivialise movement in 2v2 matches, suddenly you never need to time your jumps or anything while chasing that emp around for 10 minutes, just spam 1 button. its even worth cancelling super fast attacks like char or bib, so what if you lose target? they are the only target in your fov anyway... i would be surprised if whatever team ends up winning the event plays a single animation, other than drawing crey pistol of course. i remember when attacks like shout and bfr were high risk high reward powers in smaller team matches, now there is no risk.

maybe you dont consider me on the higher levels of the skill curve, but imo animation skipping macros are bad for the game. yes they theoretically increase the skill ceiling, but they reduce the skill gap between good and bad players, a poor player using animation cancelling will be comparatively closer to a better player, regardless of whether or not the better player is using the same macros. positioning is a major skill in this game, or at least it was, animation skipping macros are literally "never worry about positioning again with this 1 weird trick". you press 1 button and you are magically a better player, imo the game is easy enough mechanically without such things. and yes, i am well aware enforcing such a thing as banning them all would be next to impossible, so really i suppose im just arguing for argument sake at this point (though i seem to remember no one had a problem with banning emote cancelling on an honour system before we knew we could detect it through replays...) p.s. please dont use "bad players are bad lol" as a defence for anything, its a lazy argument

Its already perma-able, but it ends you break line of sight with the target or get out of range actually i think its pretty easy to perma even with no io's in it

every time i go into RV, i see more scrapper, tanks and stalkers than any other AT, unless a team decides to show up on some blasters

while funny, taunt is overpowered enough as it is lol

blaster 100%, doms just arent very good in small team/solo stuff of those 3 psi/martial would probably be my vote, /em works too. /time is generally outclassed by /plant

just to be clear, moonbeam isnt banned, just zapp because its damage is overtuned

Overall this build looks pretty good, but there are some things that could be made more optimal: - nophase makes having both phase and hiber pretty redundant. but regardless of that i think youll find this build to be quite squishy compared to other blasters because defence armours kind of suck for non-melee toons, really you either want to go phase + an ancillary with a res armour, or go hiber + tough (for blasters, other squishies can get hiber through leviathan mastery and have both a res shield and hiber). if you do go for a res shield mastery i would probably go fire so you can proc out char for another hard hitting attack - you seem to have build for damage bonus a little bit at the expense of some health, im my opinion getting closer to the hp cap will serve you better in most fights (especially because damage bonus gets dr'd, so itll do almost nothing when you pop aim or build up). if you did want to go for a damage bonus build, i would aim to get closer to 40% or more from set bonuses while having around 1750 hp or so, at the moment you are in a bit of a half-way house. - the current meta for zone is very much based around jaunt for chasing as well as escaping (though not so much for 1v1's), especially as a /em where you can out-jaunt anyone with boost range. so i would try to get some more recharge and drop hasten in order to pick up speed of sound. - the preventive medicine proc is rather unique in that it works the same way no matter where its slotted, so you can slave a slot by sticking it in hibernate - kb protection is very much not worth anything in 1v1's, but its also rare to see people knocking people back in zone. you could drop some slots from kb protection io's if you wanted to (a good target to get is 41 though, which you hit so this is all very much preference) - having said that, because very few people bring kb, and so very few people slot for it, you can slot power thrust for kb and get some easy kills just from that. also its really, really funny - it is a time honoured tradition that you arent a real /em blaster without taking total focus, one must assert dominance with the 3 second animation to earn respect something like this for a hiber variant of the build perhaps: http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1585&c=749&a=1498&f=HEX&dc=78DA6594CB6F12511487EFC020D2425B0A2DB4E551FA824219A07569E2A38546DB1AA2890B1343C67642C750404A93D667DCEBC68526268D1B5FDDB8F15F71D9850B8D0BADBAD485C1C3FD1D1E0913E09B7BDEE7DC7BD9D85F717E587D7C4E28AEE592BEBB5BB848BF75A366DBD08BE6A6A0C7B192DCD0CBE5452D6DA7D518EB0B57F572D1D8D27266CD80CF744B736DAF5AADD4EA5AB66CD48A07057236AB7B25BD6E56CAC29BAF544A5A76BF6AD4CC1DA35C9752A714AE1B7AD52C17075B8B2DA3B6BB6D565D729D338BDB75D2BAB35573535BAE94B6286E33DB819F8A4AD1F7BC683D0D552C5884C8388425C9D44035C54C833B1D1F9BB80BD9A97BCCFBE0E907CC874DAA62E0117881BC14CEA70855DAF4294C0BE8B43255B042D656F858ACEF1077E00D38F416CCC785B029B0B18D5965AEA17170F818B9AF908D1D7114FB13C8869F82A3A470700EC78822637AFFD032483C460E1FD9F4738E7E99C32146C7413FDBF8C9C6051BE18A0829BB4318E49E07036C1F04C743CC30189804B364EDE67ADC47881DE09E433C831C693DBC0F9E97F00B1D8293AF98F3CC05309281AF9BEA1CE1598C70BF11D9AF2A3CA4F3A107ABEF35EC233CE7E9F7CC43A2C721569B879B6B18FB82FD9AFE06CE7C657EC21C66B89639598B5D28946702BE62A2418FB0922488CCB66006BB17FA0BCE2D31D36034056616412FF986395A5876A48A22A9A65836257743157B8459DE8DD9B304D52AE237885155240BCC1862A612381D262D635C578C63CFAFC1663EC7BC04C6FF618A71BF22F9D9294482279408C06621C80C31C36072927B62DFDBB4D4F814683FB8A613B6F90ED6499BE613974EA0C780DABEA1F4694E36A2B62E5EA3B1166F6B1BF11ECB748F24D32359EA919CE991AC7732D2D5C21CF36AFBF60B455A3986DA77BB71D2475AF65092E8E45747665122383FD1EBD881E86545EED6CF6EBF18FC7E77FBBDC0991D7D862A52CFF9FFCC47E099DCEC6BDE04BCEB5DEFB7BADEF35DEF1FE9E265B8EE096F274ECED7911F4D75E4FF01231DF8C6 if you decide to drop some kb protection i would definitely aim to get more recharge. slotting brawl with hecatombs is an easy 10% but there maybe be better ways to get more without comprimsing. i'll leave the char version of the build to you, though i suspect it would be a bit stronger all things considered as for incarnates, it seems you are using the correct ones already in that build. intuition is always good, double hit hybrid is definitely the way to go, pyronic is op, degenerative vs reactive is largely preference but i think degen is stronger. the main debate will be which destiny to take, rebirth is definitely the safer play and more used in 1v1's, but in rv there are a lot of people who use incandescence with t3 green inspirations to be basically unkillable. which is better depends on how much effort you want to spend into restocking on greens a lot

ah the great days of 1 minutes intros, 30 seconds of "pvp" which was really just AS's on afk people, and 20 seconds of outro good times

700m should be more than enough to make a top tier build, pvp builds typically arent as loaded on purples as pve builds as a tank you arent going to be doing a massive amount of damage, but fossilize from earth mastery can hit pretty damn hard, and knockout blow is pretty good too, they are just let down by their long cd's. regardless, you should still get as many procs as is feasible in these attacks. after that, you are mostly after movespeed cap (not useful for fightclub), hp and resistance. i have no idea how to make fightclub builds, but for duelling blasters and the like, something like this would be a good starting point: Tanker_-_Bio_Armor_-_Super_Strength.mxd the build is a bit outdated, for example you would probably go into mighty leap instead of super jump, and im sure it would be pretty terrible for fight clubbing (im sure you would need more melee attacks for dps, and probably be tankier too), but it might give you some inspiration as to how to move forward.

bear in mind that depending when you left live, you may or may not be familiar with the pvp diminishing returns mechanic, which regen is effected by. however, max health is not affected by DR and your regen is based on your max hp, so regardless of your choice, getting as much hp as possible will get you more regen than stacking loads of regen bonuses. if you wanted to tryhard, i would say go dark, you also get life drain which would synergise well with the concept

it depends what kind of pvp you want to be doing. in large team pvp (like 8v8's) sentinels are outclassed as damage dealers by blasters, and aren't significantly tankier to spike damage if at all however, for zone and small pvp (1v1, 2v2) sentinels can be really good, though not all sets are created equal. for primaries your main worry is to get as much damage as possible, which ice/ and dark/ are currently the best for a think, ice doing a bit more damage but dark bringing some extra utility, both sets can be procced pretty heavily. rad gets a special mention here as also hitting decently hard and being able to slot the -res proc, which in some matchups can be pretty powerful. im afraid i cant recommend psi (my first pvp toon was a psi/regen) as it just doesnt do enough damage and cant be procced very well, though the chance for placate proc in will dom is nice... its just not enough. i have heard tell of a legendary elec/ sentinel you end drains people like a boss. bear in mind that damage type isnt very important because most things have more or less equal resistance to everything in pvp, mostly because squishy res shields/tough/etc give res to everything in pvp instead of just smash/lethal no matter what primary you go, you will want to have dominate from psi mastery or netherworld grasp from dark mastery, these will probably be your hardest hitting attacks. /regen is the king of sentinel 1v1 builds, against non-spike damage you are ridiculously tanky. /bio can work too with the same idea of just having loads of heals, while also have utility like end drain resist and so on. other secondaries can work, just avoid all the defence based armours, sentinels get the same dr curves as the squishies and so defence is just pretty nonviable. ive been theorycrafting a /fire build for a while but ive never been able to make it work 😞 if you head over to indom youll often see people like "eternal one" looking for 1v1's on his ice/regen sent if you ever went to see it in action. there are also vods around of a double sentinel team winning a 2v2 tournament, and an ice/bio coming third in another 2v2 tournament, though both of these tournies are several months old now and the meta has evolved somewhat 😛