SeraphimKensai

I always liked the Cysts, because they presented a challenge to a regular team especially if they caught them unaware. I've always been one for having a decent challenge, and cysts were one of the toughest npc spawns in the game if they weren't dealt with right away.

I wouldn't want to team up with Nazi's either, but I figured there's other factions that might have an interest like the Awakened PPD that I mentioned.

Ah I had read the Council invented the quantum guns and void hunters, but since they are led by Arkhan and Requiem (their goal being to infect the whole world), it would probably need missions by player teams to assault a base and steal the quantum guns to help them fight the invasion. You're absolutely right about existing mobs getting infected, although the lore says the host typically has to be willing unless they are weakened (albeit getting blasted by a horse of unbound nictus would definitely weaken something), so it's definitely possible I suppose that Sally or Hamidon could get infected with a Nictus.

Hey folks, I proposed a suggestion for a Nictus invasion to help give the community some more kheldian content, feel free to check out the suggestion at it's forum link: The Nictus Invasion. Thanks.

Could even bring in Sunstorm, Shadowstar, Moonfire, the Awakened PPD, etc. to lead players to fight back the invasion via objectives and such. Could be a fun event. Examples of possible objectives: 1. Raid Council Outposts/Bases for Quantum weapon temp powers, nictus fragments, etc. 2. Fight off localized assaults (Atlas Park City Hall, Portal Corp, the Vanguard Base, etc.) in zones to prevent Shadow Cysts from portaling in tons of unbound nictus. 3. Nictus infused monster hunting. What happens when Lusca, Kraken, Jack In Irons, Sally, Death Surge, Paladin, etc. get infected with a Nictus? They become more of a threat with new powers for us to fight off. 4. Arkhan/Requiem have achieved nigh ultimate power and fighting over leadership of the Nictus Invasion Force. Stand with heroes, villains, vigilantes, and rogues to decimate the invading force's leadership.

Is it just me, or do Shadow Cysts not spawn anywhere besides in the ITF? Any chance we can get an event to have a Nictus Invasion (similar to a rikti invasion, but with free floating nictus, crystals, dark/bright Nova's, and black/white dwarves). Perhaps the Council can spawn in forces led by Requiem and Arkhan to welcome the invasion, giving us opportunity to lead expeditions to steal temporary power quantum gun arrays to players, and maybe a quantum nullifier (new temp power idea to give player Kheldians extra protection from the Negative Energy of the Quantum guns). The Nictus could try and set up Cyst Seeds to bring in more of their invasion force and flood a zone, and players could band together to fight them back. If a zone is being invaded, standard 100% debt protection like they do during rikti dropship, Halloween events, etc. Any thoughts?

You can use a spines/Elec scrapper to farm SL if you build up the defense via IOs, it gets pretty decent resistances overall. AoE centric, it would be a decent combo.

Wow just stumbled upon this thread and read through it all. I had an Ill/ff troller back in live which I enjoyed, but as IO's came out it was essentially shelves as everyone builds for defense. I've recently rolled a fire/ff troller. Of all the suggestions that I read through, I think the ones with the most merit at least in my opinion were as follows in order of priority would be: 1). Self Buffs with Deflection and Insulation. 2). DDR with PFF, Deflection, Insulation, and Dispersion. 3). The Absorb mechanic coming into Dispersion. 4). An incremental Defense Debuff on enemies inside the range of Force Bubble. Regardless which changes one favors, I think we can all agree that FF needs some love.

Also you'll want your dwarf form, because you can switch into it even while messed and then you've got status protection. It's basically a break free that turns you into a tank.

IMO, I really enjoy 3 form perma eclipse double miring warshades that rain down umbral fire on their targets, refill based on their corpses, and steal the souls of them to fuel your minions. I wouldn't really try a single form version mainly because of double mires.

I run a FortNight multi build hero that has 3 fully built builds. One as a Night Widow focusing on Melee, one as a Fortunata focusing on Ranged, and the last as a Blood Widow focusing on maximizing support via pools. The thing is a beast, I just wish there wasn't a 1 minute CD on swapping builds.

As someone with 3 lvl 50 controllers and 2 on the way, it sounds good.

Warshades benefit more from form swapping then Peacebringers do because of how Sunless Mire works. In which case you'll always want at bare minimum with a Warshade Dwarf form so you can have 2 stacking mires. Nova is nice then as a floating howitzer of soon while buffed.

I have both fully IO'd, warshade with a MF-3 Form build and What I call a FortNight (multi build using Fortunate/Night Widow with full IO set builds, while mine also has a third build for a support based blood widow as well). The Warshade is fun if you can have density, and it's a very active build hot swapping forms on the fly multiple times per enemy group, it relies on damage resistance. The FortNight is fun, although super expensive, for mine I bought IO's for.3 builds (eg. 15 LotG 7.5's), you can swap forms once/minute. Less active than the Warshade. Lots of Leadership, and super defense softcaps for incarnate content. (Drawback to a FortNight, when you swap builds all your CD's go on cool down immediately, including long recharge prestige powers like ATT).

I'd pick stalker. More damage and can be built to be super survivable.

Dominators really come into their own once you start slotting them, and then the play style completely changes once you have enough global recharge to go permadom. When you're permadom, you will become the steamroller.

I like Galaxy Brain's idea about having the armor toggles that are exclusive with granite offer some modified benefits to running with Granite. Perhaps they could be used to mitigate some of the negatives associated with Granite. Example ideas of the armors when used with Granite (note: in Granite the normal armor effect of the armor toggles is nullified,and outside of Granite, the Granite effects are nullified): Brimstone - The heat of the armor boosts your recharge by 5% per enemy within mudpots'range. This allows you to negate your -65% recharge debuff when surrounded by 13 mobs, and at agro cap boosts it by 20%. Crystal - Jagged crystals boost your damage by 3% per enemy within mudpots' range. This allows you to negate the -30% damage debuff at 10 mobs around you, and if you are at agro cap of 17, boosts damage by 21%. Minerals - Minerals fortify your strength to allow you to jump, or fly. It can be enhanced to reduce the 90% movement speed reduction on you as well. Caveat: only one armor toggle in addition to Granite can be used at once? Thoughts?

That would be cool, but I'd settle for having a Null the Gull in our own bases.

I've looked over a lot of builds for forts and night widows regarding how people slot Mind Link. The power takes Defense Buff and To Hit enhancements, it does not take recharge. A common goal ppl have is to perma Mind Link. Back when Widows and Forts 1st came out, a common trick was to slot in Membrane HO's as the power would then benefit from both the Defense Buff, To Hit, and Recharge of the HO. Fast forward to today. In both Mids Reborn, Mind Link has a base recharge of 240 seconds. It shows Mind Link benefitting from a HO:Membrane, so slotting 3, makes the recharge 123.1 seconds, effectively making the power Perma by itself. I see numerous builds recommending Membranes, and realistically they are pretty spendy, on Everlasting right around 30 mil for both the normal and synthetic version. I did testing last night on Mind Link on Everlasting.... (Note: I have 5 LotG global recharge IO's, Mental Training, and Hasten affecting my recharge, nothing else). I have CD timers turned on for my powers. Mind Link with no slots and with a single HO: Membrane - Mind Link's recharge is not affected by slotting the Membrane at all in game, despite Mids Reborn/Pines showing that it is. It is definitely affected by global recharge reduction, but since the power does not accept recharge reduction enhancements, locally, it does not benefit from that. The power also boosts To Hit, while someone might be curious how much To Hit buff someone gets with 3 Membranes, that would be 7.8% to Hit Buff, the base amount without slotting for To Hit Buff is 5%. For perspective unslotted Tactics ot Tactical Training: Leadership, each give 10% To Hit Buff unslotted. Follow Up does 10% unslotted, and Build Up does 20% unslotted. It doesn't seem like Mind Link really gives a decent enough To Hit Buff for me to merit slotting for To Hit Buff. I use the power for capping defense, which as I assume everyone here is rather intelligent, does as well. Because of all that, and based on current pricing trends, I can not in good fashion recommend anyone to use Membranes in Mind Link, unless someone really is slot starved and wants to buff both Defense and To Hit. IO Sets are significantly cheaper and you can then build towards global set bonuses as well. So at some point the power was changed to not allow benefit from the recharge of slotted enhancements that reduce recharge on a local level (which I did quit back during i16 until coming back this past spring, so there was a lot of time for the power to change).

Mega, I could see having a few visual styles for granite like the other powers, crystal has a slight translucency to it which I personally like, but I can understand people likely wanting a minimum fx option as well to see costumes.

When CoH launched back in 2004 people were literally in awe whenever they saw a 2 ton chunk of sidewalk teleporting or walking around to save the day. They could sit in the thick of it and go cook dinner, while other tanks had to be more active. Granite was essentially god mode back in the day, bar few enemy types, a Granite tanker was not dying. That was balanced out by being nigh unmoveable. It couldn't run, jump, or fly. Its powers suffered a huge debuff to recharge speed and damage output, so it wasn't killing anything either. But it excelled at holding agro, and taking the hits the rest of the team or raid couldn't. *ED came by and nerfed everything across the board, this (rightfully) took away a Stone Armor tanker's immortality with Granite Armor, but the massive debuffs persisted as it could still out tank everything else. *IO's came by, and made it so other tankers or brutes since they had been introduced when CoV launched could build themselves to be nigh unkillable gods, Stone Armor over the years saw a massive reduction in the number of people playing the powerset as overcoming those limitations the set had since launch became a waste of time when someone could turn an Invuln tank or the recently added Willpower tanks into gods. *Incarnate content came by, and all the powersets further benefited, leaving Stone tanks to collect further dust. As just about anyone is aware the standard rule of thumb, is that people almost will not play a Stone Armor character without a Pocket Kin. Given all that, what I would suggest, which in order of priority.... 1. Let Stone Armor Tankers in Rooted or Granite jump or fly. The limitation to do so is kind of silly considering we are all superheroes, what's to say a Rock Golem can't fly? Maybe a magic spell was placed on them that let's them , or they have some really advanced rocket boots? With the new addition of Force of Will, I think Mighty Leap would be a great fit for a chink of sidewalk landing on a mob of 5th Collumn flattening Nazi's left and right. 2. Let's ease up the -damage (which is -30%, I mean why would getting punched by something weighing 2 tons cause less damage? The weight alone should crush its puny target). 3. Let's ease up the -recharge (which is -65%, hasten is a +70%, so you get slightly better than baseline recharge with hasten running, perma hasten is pretty much impossible in Granite as well). Perhaps we have a -50% speed debuff on Granite/Rooted (perhaps 25% per power) paired with a -30% recharge reduction, which is still a significant overall debuff to a player, albeit less severe than the current debuffs. Like I suggest, the first proposed change would basically be for thematic purposes and doesn't really effect combat, just gives players more choices on how they get around. The other 2 would have an impact on combat, but I think in the age of IO sets and incarnate content, these would make people enjoy playing the powerset more, but not completely break the set outside of a reasonable balance. Any thoughts?

I edited my original post by adding a sentence when I was talking about why not to just have the full amount of HP that Dull Pain provides going to Absorb shields to make it more clear. My intent is any remaining HP that Dull Pain or similar powers would give after you hit the HP Cap is applied to an Absorb Shield, that way that amount of HP is not lost, and building for +HP remains viable. I hope that clears up any confusion. HP Caps for various ATs: Base | Cap Tanker 1874.1 3534 Brute 1499.7 3212.7 Scrapper 1338.6 2409.5 PB 1070.9 2409.5 So as a simple example in which I'll use rounded numbers to easier illustrate concept: Let's say I have an Invuln Tank and after IO's and Accolades my HP was hypothetically: 2800 HP I popped Dull Pain, which we'll say adds: 1200 HP If there was no HP Cap, my HP would then be 4000 HP Obviously there is a cap so my HP is: 3534 HP We lose 466 HP, gone to the wind. If we instead gained an Absorb shield of 466, our effective HP would be back to that 4000 that we would of had if there had been no HP Cap. In this example though because the HP Cap exists, we regen health based on the actual HP and not the shield, so at most in the example: 3534.

The last couple days I've been playing both an invulnerability and a stone armor tank. Both characters, among others have powers that give +Max HP. Each set has a power which boosts Max HP, and were originally designed before the Absorb mechanic came out. AT's have HP caps. What I'm suggesting, to keep these powers useful, which seems practical given characters hitting hp caps with IO's, accolade bonuses and such is to make whatever amount of HP that powers like Dull Pain or Earth's Embrace would have in excess over the the HP cap if it wasn't there converted into an Absorb shield of equal value. Why not just make Dull Pain or Earth's Embrace give their full amount to Absorb shields? The powers can act as emergency heal, and also increasing the Max HP plays into the character's HP regen/second. So moving the powers completely over to absorb shields would negate those aspects of the powers. Doing so would be a loss on regen, and would not be advised. Anyone else have any thoughts given this?

I only have 2 lvl 50 IO'd and incarnated stalkers: psi/sr, and elec/bio. I had a couple more back during the live era as well but not all the sets discussed here. For an Sr stalker, you are defense based so any set that either reduces tohit or increases defense will be decent. For my sr, I went with Psi as it's not too often resisted. The character shreds things solo until streak breaker goes into effect, then I pop a couple inspirations and continue to slaughter things.

I would go Agility, as I did with my do/times corruptor. +Defense +Recharge makes Power Boosted Farsight insanely strong. Wanna tank?