Call Me Awesome

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I think this change came about after shutdown, I used to have it two slotted with Membranes back on Live at shutdown.

I'll give you my method for melee tanking Lord Recluse, I've done it on MoSTF runs with Invuln, Stone and Shield tankers... your secondary really doesn't matter much, and you don't need a babysitter to keep you alive. You MUST HAVE TAUNT!!!! First, I have an Insp load out for it, I carry 4 big oranges, 8 big purples and a pair of big blues and greens. This varies with the tank I'm running... for example with a Stone tank you can skip the orange and blues... you'll be at or almost at the 90% resistance cap with Granite and a decent build so Orange is pointless. Rooted makes you nearly immune to end drain so the blues aren't needed. You will want to be at 90% resistance to S/L/E damage while the red tower's up (which doubles his damage output) and you'll want 75% defense while the blue tower is up (it's a large +tohit buff for him). Keep in mind you'll find it almost impossible to actually hit him since the tower also gives him a massive defense buff, this is why you MUST have an auto hit taunt to keep his attention. Ok, you've done your homework and have your strategy and load out. Enter the mission and clear the 4 patron AV's, the Flyer AND all the mobs in the courtyard. If you leave the mobs they'll come and be a nuisance while you're clearing the towers so get rid of them first. One more point, the Flyer will respawn at the 20 minute mark from when you entered the mission, it's a good idea to keep an eye on this so it doesn't take you by surprise. It will spawn in the center of the towers on the platform and if you're still fighting towers at this point it will likely aggro on you. After you've cleared the patrons, flyer and mobs then make sure everyone is on the same page, eat your candy and jump in to say hi to LR. I pull him to the rear of the platform away from the team to keep them away from any splash damage while they take down the Red tower. This also has the effect of keeping him and me away from the point where the Flyer will respawn if the mission runs long. If someone on the team has a placeable damage power like Bonfire then have them keep it on the tower, this will kill the repairmen that spawn at 50% of the tower's life. Hurricane also works here. The repairmen are the team's #1 priority to kill immediately, they'll heal the tower back up to full amazingly quickly. Fortunately they're only around level 40 minions so they're easy to kill. Knock them down, keep them away and don't let them use their heal. Bonfire loaded with damage usually kills them all by itself. While your team is killing the towers, preferably in this order: Red/Blue/Orange/Green you'll be taunting LR and keeping him away from the team. While the red tower's up maintain ~90% S/L/E resistance and 75% defense (S/L/E or Melee/Range/AOE). When the red tower drops you can allow the orange insps to wear off while maintaining your defense until the blue tower dies. Once the blue is gone he's pretty much an ordinary AV and you should have no problems surviving if you have a decent build. The Red tower buffs his damage output by 105%, the Blue tower buffs his ToHit by 30% and gives him Speed Boost, the Orange tower grants him 200% defense so you won't be hitting him while it's up and the Green tower gives him a massive regeneration buff as well as a constant heal and +HP. If he gets lucky with either an attack or his end drain eat a green or blue, or hit your heal if you have one. Don't stop taunting him! If taunt wears off of him he WILL decide to kill your team! Your aura alone won't hold his attention, and if it isn't auto hit then it likely won't affect him. Stone's Mud Pots and Fire's Blazing Aura for example require a to hit check and while the orange tower's up it won't hit him 95% of the time. Invuln's Invincibility is marginal for maintaining his interest unless you slotted it's taunt component. YOU NEED TAUNT to hold his attention, and I highly recommend spamming it. Don't waste endurance trying to attack him while Orange is up, at best you'll hit him 5% of the time and at worst your endurance will be low when he nails you with his drain and your toggles will drop. Once the towers are down I keep him at the back of the platform and the team attacks him from behind. This is important, LR has a really nasty cone attack that will do major damage to your squishier teammates so they need to stay behind him. When LR gets to 25% he'll start summoning minions, everyone should ignore them and burn him down, they'll all vanish when he dies. In all the runs I've made I doubt there's been more than 2 or 3 times that the adds were a problem, most teams can drop LR the final 25% faster than they can spawn, target and start to attack. That's the method I use when I'm tanking, doing it in Melee gives me more control of his position than hovering over his head and some tankers don't work as well hovering as they do on the ground, Stone for example, and Invuln so you keep the defense buff from Invincibility. It does require a tougher tank and you need to pay attention. I frequently put Taunt on auto fire while I'm tanking him to make sure I don't get distracted and loose his aggro. If your aura is auto hit then it's also contributing to holding his attention if you're in melee. If you simply want to range tank him you don't even need a tank... I did it a couple times with a blaster firing from extreme range and making damn sure to get him to the opposite corner from the rest of the team since I obviously didn't have any lock on his attention. One time I got him to jump up onto the top ledge of the building behind him and his AI glitched so he just stood there not moving. After killing the towers the team had to fly up and kill him there while he never moved or attacked. It only happened once and that was shortly after the STF was introduced so whatever bug allowed it may have been patched.

I've seen this exact suggestion dozens of times over the years and it's always gotten a "no". People would roll a "fast starting" combo and then change into a "late blooming" combo. And, of course, apparently the game is hard coded to Origin (worthless as we all know), AT, Primary/Secondary. Those are the locked in stone attributes of each character. So, on the one hand it allows an easy way to game the power/leveling curve and on the other the game code doesn't allow that to change without likely MAJOR surgery to the core functionality... which would likely introduce some really nasty bugs and/or side effects. Hmm, major programming change (if it's even possible without basically a page one rewrite of the code) with the benefit of partially breaking the power and leveling even more than it currently is. I see that as a Loose/Loose proposition.

Yep, dang thing is addictive isn't it? At least it's cheaper than drugs... although it can have much the same effect on you the next day.

I can promise that teammates will have disparaging things to say when they peel enemies off of you. Things like "pointless" or "pathetic". A tank that easily looses aggro isn't a tank, they're a low damage scrapper or brute. If you're planning to team then you need to learn to manage aggro, and Taunt is an invaluable tool for that. CAN I manage aggro without it? Yes, but I know the tricks and WORK at it. DO I have Taunt on all tanks? Heck yes, it's the best tool in your arsenal for grabbing aggro, and one of the very few you can use to get aggro without physically moving over to each individual mob that may be outside of the group clustered around you. Bottom line, if you're not going to take Taunt and manage aggro then roll up a brute or scrapper... they'll do better damage and their durability is more than adequate. Plus teams won't expect you to manage aggro and cuss your name when you don't.

I agree that it went straight into the crapper after season 1, but I do think that first season was a fantastic show.

Unfortunately that requires you to sit idle for awhile, and even then you just see your armor and helmet. So far that's my one real complaint about the game, although I'm still in the early stages yet. I haven't yet decided if skill points are too plentiful or not; at around level 14 it seems I have more than I have a need for. Perks seem a bit underwhelming so far.

I grabbed this a couple days ago... it's quite a lot like Fallout with a splash of KOTOR thrown in. I've just finished the starter planet and it had some really difficult choices in the main story line. Performance wise it seems pretty similar to Fallout 4 so if you can run that you should be good. Unfortunately it's a first person perspective with no option for 3rd person, so all that time you spent at character creation getting your look right is completely wasted as you'll almost never see it.

Ah look, another "Nerf Hasten" thread. They seem to be like weeds and pop up every month or two... and have ever since 2004.

If you want to play in melee then Fire/Fire is a contender, you're likely to eat a lot of aggro though. If you want to play at range then Fire/EM is a good choice with Boost Range letting you reach out and touch someone. I'm happy with the DPS of my Fire/EM/Fire blaster, Bonfire (with KB-KD proc), Rain of Fire, Fireball & Breath of Fire makes for a dandy minion melter and ghetto control power with Blaze & Blazing Bolt to say hi to the boss... not to mention your Nuke every 30-40 seconds.

Well, yes as your defense gets closer to the soft cap each % is worth more than the last. It's the difference between getting hit 14% of the time and 10% of the time, so it's there but it may not matter that much. Personally I'd likely stick to 36% and eat a small purple if things get tight and think about other parts of the build at that point. Depending on your build you may get more use out of other bonuses.

So it's one of the "120 second" procs where it's active while the power's active and for 2 minutes after? Seems reasonable since there's certainly a lot of procs that work like that.

You can soft cap defense to at least one category, for example S/L or Melee, with literally ANY AT and powerset in the game whether your powers provide any defense or not. I have a Fire/EM blaster with soft capped Ranged defense from mostly IO bonuses. I have a Fire/Regen stalker with soft capped S/L defense from pools and IO bonuses. Now if your sets don't provide any defense at all you'll have a lot of trouble getting to the soft cap in more than one category. I haven't made a real study of it but absent a set providing defense if it's possible at all to soft cap everything it'll be extremely gimped in other areas and likely highly expensive. Now Claws as your primary will leave out Shield as a secondary but SR, EA, WP, Inv and undoubtedly several others are doable to hit the soft cap for most everything. However, the defense soft cap isn't the holy grail of durability; with the exception of SR you'll find quite a few mobs capable of stripping your defense from you with debuffs so having a second line of defense is a good idea. High defenses layered on top of high resistances and/or regeneration/healing will work better than defense alone.

I seem to recall that years ago it was a "known fact" (for what that's worth) that 75-80% of all damage in the game had a S/L component to it, I wonder if that's accurate and if it's still the case. I always took that as a given when planning a build and while I haven't actually crunched any numbers it does seem to work out close to that. In any event S/L/E seem to account for 3/4 of all damage, and unless I'm mistaken the majority of Energy also comes with a Smashing component... with Ice frequently coming with Lethal and others likewise somehow including a S/L component it certainly makes sense. Cold being the rarest damage in the game DOES surprise me however. I knew it was rare but I'd thought it higher than Psi and Toxic.

Yeah, those Gold Box D&D were some of the first games I ever played. The first computer I owned was a 286 with I think an 8Mhz processor running DOS and an early EGA graphics card. I played all of the Gold Box games... I think there were 4 altogether. Anyway, in the early 90's I bought a 486DX and got a real shock when I decided to try those old games again. Enter combat and ZAP, it's over before you blink. I still recall how impressive the graphics on 7th Guest at the time.

As an Energy blaster you'll need to learn to manage and control your knockback or teams will hate you. This isn't a joke either, almost everything you do has a knockback built into it... shoot at a mob the Tank has under control, that mob goes flying out of range of the Tank forcing him to either pick it up again or ignore it as your problem. Shoot a mob the Scrapper is pounding on, send it flying away and the Scrapper has to go running after it, which does not endear you to him. I suggest flying above the action so your KB just knocks them into the ground. I also suggest slotting KB-KD IO's as soon as you can. I know there's players who swear by Energy blasters but frankly most players swear AT them instead and I'm one of them. Strictly on a personal level the KB will tend to reduce the damage you take but it comes at the cost of disrupting the team. Bad Energy blasters are at least as disruptive as bad Storm characters with all the scattering mobs and tossing them to the 4 winds. Frankly as your first ranged build I'd suggest you pick another primary. Fire is #1 in damage, both AOE and ST and most of the others work well. Assault Rifle is dead last in all categories so I'd suggest skipping it also.

Go with 5 Fire/Rad controllers. With halfway decent builds and players it should be cake.

My little Reggie, a purebred Sheltie... in 3/4 scale. Dunno why he came out so small, both parents were normal sized at 25lbs, he's only 18lbs.

Well, I rolled a Stone/EM tanker after the GDN and ED, so around issue 6. I reached 50 just in time to get hit with the bat hard and permanently retire the character, so likely it was issue 7 or at the latest issue 8. I kept the character until around issue 20 in the hopes that the nerf would be revisited, then it became the only level 50 I ever deleted.

I seem to remember that happening on several powers way back when, the proc would fire on the mobs instead of on the player. It seemed to be a common issue with procs on Live. I'll bet that's where the issue is. Fixing it may be another matter however.

I hate to rain on anyone's parade here but that sounds like it would take a huge amount of new graphics work and animation to pull off. I think we'd need to have a full time dev team to manage this; remember that our devs are all volunteers doing this part time while also working full time jobs to put groceries on the table. Bottom line I think we need to think mainly in terms of low lying fruit rather than whole new systems, graphics and animations.

I'm not sure what you're asking here, I have the Nostromo under my left hand and it's used for movement forward/back/strafe left/right along with my attacks, travel power and jump. The mouse is used for rotation and other buff powers are bound to the side keys. I only use the keyboard for chat so I'm not touching it otherwise. The rocker switch on the gamepad under my left thumb controls movement, the button just above the rocker is "Target Enemy Near", the button below the rocker is "Follow". The buttons 1-10 are my tray 1 powers, button 11 is spacebar and buttons 12-14 are various key binds as needed. Powers that don't end up on either tray 1 or bound to one of the keys on the mouse/gamepad are accessed by clicking. Those are almost always toggle powers such as armors, leadership and the like or are only occasionally needed and always out of combat like Assemble the Team, Team Transport and similar. While I'm in combat my hands don't leave the mouse & gamepad and I very seldom need to click anything.

That would be a lot of work on the Dev's part for less than .01% of the player base who actually reaches VL 100 to say nothing of the higher VL's. The vast majority of us tend to roll an alt when we reach 100, or when we manage to finish incarnating to t3 or t4. Back on Live I MIGHT have had a character reach the equivalent of higher than VL 100... that I'd played from issue 3 to shutdown. I'm going with a hard no on this, the ideas I've seen present too many problems and either end up overpowered or useless as the players will never see the benefit.

Maybe, it looks like there's still a TON of work yet to go before they have a functional game. I'm not sure it'll actually launch unless they get a sponsor and are able to hire full time developers for it. The last I looked it seemed like they were maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the way there after what, 7 years now? Don't get me wrong I'd love for them to succeed, I tossed them a few bucks on the kickstarter when they started out. I just think they drastically underestimated the amount of work required.