[2V2 SUNDAY AUGUST 11TH! 4.3 BIL INF PRIZE POOL]

rigged

 

thanks xhiggy and fire wire, was a lot of fun 🙂

[General Build Philosophy?]

 

2 hours ago, Solok said:

I know a lot of people prefer SS & SJ for travel powers but for me personally I prefer Fly. Does SS & SJ offer any other benefits I'm not aware of other than traveling?

(Plus if I choose Fly it gives me an extra slot for something rather than SS & SJ - just sayin)

fly is pretty unusable in pvp unfortunately, its really slow so you wont be able to evade/chase as well as a super speeder, though you do have the option of flying straight up... but you may still not be fast enough

 

but the real kicker is the prevalence of webnades and the like, which completely ground you/disable fly, which is obviously a bad time

[PvP videos and channels]

joining in on the forum video sharing meta:

 

 

[about /plant and /temporal question]

wild fortress is 1 corner of the /plant triangle, the other two being toxins and strangler:

 

toxins is better than most (every?) build ups because it adds toxic damage to every attack, which unlike damage bonus isnt subject to diminishing returns

 

strangler can be procced pretty easily to do a lot of damage (it hits harder than a lot of blaster primary attacks, most even). /temp also gets a hold but unlike strangler its melee, whereas strangler is ranged

 

 

/temp isnt bad, you are right in the absorb shield being pretty good, and the +rech it gets is decent, but /plant just kind of outclasses it

[2V2 SUNDAY AUGUST 11TH! 4.3 BIL INF PRIZE POOL]

registering:
@mjb - necro/emp mm
@Spag Bol - ice/poison corr

[PvP Free Agents]

found a team, leaving the rest of the post for nostalgia:

 

Name: MJB

Global: @mjb

Preferred Role(s): any

Available Characters:

 

mjb - fire/em blaster

some bro - Psy/TA Blaster

some gymnast - beam/ta blaster

some bot - Emp/water Defender

some vegetable - nature/ice def

some breh - psy/regen sent

some lady - earth/fire dom

 

Availability: UK so annoying, weeknights before 2-6pm eastern, fri/sat I can stay up later without feeling too bad for myself but still wouldnt want to go later than like 9pm eastern really

[Question about blaster instant snipe]

yes its for both, and no one really knows when itll go live

[Question about blaster instant snipe]

tohit is subject to diminishing returns in pvp, like (almost) every other stat

 

what this means is youll never have instant snipe without aim/build up active in pvp, unless other people give you tohit buffs (extra tactics stacks, emp fortitude etc)

 

the good news is, whenever the patch thats currently on the test server goes live, insta-snipe will no longer have anything to do with tohit, and instead will be instant if you are "in combat"

[Dimension Shift how does it work in pvp?]

the immobilise works the same as all other immobilises, so yes they can walk right out once it wears off (or if they are in mez suppression, e.g. after a hold)

 

what im not sure about is whether or not dimension shift applies/is affected by nophase, if it isn't then it may be an effective escape tool

[Dark Blast/Plant Blaster and Moonbeam?]

2 possible reasons:

 

1) pines is bugged

2) pines is being clever and seeing that you have over 97% tohit, which makes the snipe instant cast. in pvp ability damage is based largely on its activation time (and a few other factors), so when the snipe becomes instant, its activation time reduces (notably, 0 interrupt time instead of 3 or whatever the default is) and so its damage does too

 

I see both of these options as being about equally likely

[Blaster Set besides Ice?]

you cant really go wrong with /plant, however /ta is also really strong (imo better than plant in a lot of situations) purely because of gymnastics, though grounding people with net arrow/glue arrow is endless fun. /em also gets a shoutout, its usable but not quite as good as /plant and /ta imo. /devices is getting changed on the beta patch and might be a lot more viable because of it, not sure (it does have a niche atm in that you can get perma insta-snipe thanks to targeting drone, but thats also changing on beta). i dont know about other sets

 

corrs and sentinels work a bit differently, so no the above advice doesnt quite work for them, for example the corruptor version of psi doesnt get psychic focus (aim), which is a somewhat big deal, however all corruptors get dominate from psi mastery, which helps your damage a lot regardless of primary. having said that damn near every corruptor ive seen is running ice...

 

similarly the dark mastery hold for sentinels does massive amounts of damage, which makes your primary somewhat less important, i run a psi sentinel to some success but psi for sentinels works very differently to blasters (you dont get a snipe with a travel time, so no 3 power burst). lots of people are running ice sentinels... surprise surprise. theres been some rumours of beam sentinels doing rather well, their survivability allows them to build up disintegrate stacks pretty well, and its one of the few (only?) sentinels primaries with a snipe, which is nice. other primaries i dont know a whole lot about

[Blaster Set besides Ice?]

all of this is for blasters only, corrs/defenders/sentinels have some caveats here

 

with that said; yes there are many alternatives to ice, that may even better given certain contexts, ice is just really easy to get a lot of damage out of and is generally highly rated in all contexts.

you cant really go wrong with ice, but for other sets:

 

psi: arguably better than ice for large team environments, has fantastic burst damage, especially once the snipe changes go live, but your basic combo is will dom -> snipe -> tk blast (or strangler if you are /plant i suppose). because of the projectile travels times, all 3 attacks will hit at roughly the same time making it seem like 1 attack. you can imagine 2 or 3 psi blasters doing this at the same time would be rather scary burst damage, however the sustained damage isnt that high. once the the 3 hit combo is used, you are mostly waiting around for it to come back up

 

rad: might be top damage dealer with the snipe changes, not sure yet, but even now its definitely viable and does decent damage, its just outshone by ice atm a little bit. another thing to note is the animations dont feel as "smooth" as ice imo, but that may come down to preference

 

dark: king of 1v1's imo, you get a lot of utility between life drain and -tohit on every attack. you also get a nice hold that you can proc out. unfortunately on the current patch the snipe is rather useless, however i think its going to be amazing once the beta patch comes out, which will give a nice damage boost. the gist of the set is you trade some damage for some utility

 

fire: is a little weird, in large teams it lacks a lot of damage imo, but in small teams (think 2v2, 3v3 sort of thing) the extra damage you get from the DOTs adds up to quite a bit of offensive pressure, unfortunately the set is really hard to proc though, so you really want a hold from somewhere. strangler from /plant would be the best option, but if you have another secondary you can get char from fire mastery, or spirit shark jaws from leviathan and they kinda-sorta work. personally i run char and can do a pseudo snipe burst with char -> blaze -> blazing bolt for some burst, but its not as effective as psi

 

beam: kind of similar to fire but more up front damage/not as reliant on DOTs. probably better in smaller teams because the damage takes some time to ramp up due to needing to lead with disintegrate (no burst, but good damage tbh, it just all comes as DOTs) before you hit really hard with your other powers. it has a neat trick in that the snipe damage is REALLY delayed, so you can snipe -> lancer shot to have both hit at roughly the same time, and they both hit really hard which gives some viability to joining in on large team spikes. another thing to note is that piercing beam is bugged atm and does less damage than it should, if that ever gets fixed then it gives you a third high power attack (though with one hell of an animation time) that also does -res, which would be pretty nice i think

 

dual pistols: honestly i dont know a lot about this set, but someone is gonna get mad at me if i dont include it. the set does a tonne of damage tbh, but has a major drawback in the animation times are really long, so you spend half the time planted on the ground being an easy target

 

 

 

now ive said in a few places "good for 1v1" or "large teams" or w/e, but really all the sets listed are viable for everything atm, its just some are a little more optimised for one thing or the other. also there may be some other sets that are good and just not come to my mind as i write this... idk

 

 

tl;dr there are more options than ice ffs

 

 

[5v5 event! No team needed! Big prizes! Limit 2 of each AT. 6:30 Est. Sun, July 7]

Global: @mjb

Known aliases: mjb, some breh, some lady, some vegetable, some gymnast, some healer, some plant, some weapons guy

PvP Builds: (fully io'd)

-fire/em blaster

-beam/ta blaster

-earth/fire dom

-nature/ice def

-psi/regen sent

-emp/water def

 

[Lethal Lottery Tournament! With Prizes! Sunday, June 2nd at 6PM EST!]

obviously rigged

[MAP CALL FOR NEW ARENA MAPS]

i would like oroboros with all the islands, but not sure how fun it would be

 

certainly the main island would be a cool 1v1 map

[PvP Duel Ladder on Indomitable]

im down

[Lethal Lottery Tournament! With Prizes! Sunday, June 2nd at 6PM EST!]

@mjb

 

some breh psi/regen sentinel