Call Me Awesome

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.

This is absolutely correct. It's decent early and matures into a monster with utterly massive AOE and decent ST damage coupled with great durability. All the ATO sets are nice but they're a nice addition rather than the cornerstone the character's built around. Mine is capable of clearing one of the asteroid maps at x8 in around 5 minutes, it's equally good on teams running most anything. I found the character quite effective from the mid teens on through incarnate trials. Every Stalker I've played plays like a Scrapper who gets to choose the moment combat starts. Once you fire off your Alpha strike just pretend you're a Scrapper and kill them all. You're as durable as a Scrapper and you have about the same damage output.

That's partially why all my characters pick up Combat Jumping, it allows you great mobility and the ability to get out of melee for a second and hit a heal, eat an insp or whatever and then right back in to beating the bad guy's face in. Of course it also provides a place to put a Kismet +To Hit and maybe another LotG +recharge.

Frankly I've only run into this limit once since 2004 and that was back before Fitness became inherent and we had to blow 3 power choices for Hurdle/Health/Stamina on every character. It's a rare character that will find room for all 4 pools and an APP; if you're butting up against that limit you may want to rethink your build, likely there's some changes you'll want to make. At a guess I'd say this limit is likely pretty deep in the game code and probably not easy to change. I day it's not worth the trouble for such a marginal benefit.

Buy the attuned so you have the set bonuses available to you from 3 levels below the minimum of the set all the way to 50. Attuned IO's will also increase their enhancement value with your level; if you buy a level 30 it will give the exact same enhancement at 50 as it does at 30. If you buy that same IO attuned then at level 30 it's a level 30 IO with that enhancement value and when you reach level 50 that IO will work as a level 50 with that enhancement value. In my opinion if you aren't ever going to exemp then buy level 50 IO's and boost them. The set bonuses would shut off at level 46 however. Buying level 30 IO's and boosting them will give you a small advantage at level 27-35 but you'll be loosing effectiveness at level 50. Attuned will provide set bonuses down to -3 levels of the lowest level the IO exists at. Numina's for example is a level 30-50 set so if it's attuned you'll get the bonuses from level 27-50. Kinetic Combat I believe is level 20-35 so attuned it'll provide bonuses from 17-50; it's raw enhancement percentages will stop increasing at level 35 as that's the limit of that set. The level of an attuned IO is based on your current level within the limits of it's level range. A set with a range of 15-30 will always function based on that range... when you exceed it's level it stops improving it's enhancement values and continues to work at it's top level. A set with a range of 30-50 likewise always works as if it's your current level from level 30-50. Exemp below a set's minimum level and you loose the set bonuses but it will still enhance your powers... based on a rather complicated level scaling formula. My advice is to always buy attuned. While you're leveling they will level with you and when you exemp down they'll keep their set bonuses down to -3 levels below their set minimum. Yes, they'll degrade their enhancement values as you exemp below 35? I think, but they'll continue to work. The thought of buying level 30 and boosting them to +5 DOES make them stronger when you exemp below 30 but they'll be weaker at 50.

Remember there's some defense debuffs that are autohit, things like Earthquake and the Rad debuffs that those Crey minions use that can do a number on your defense no matter how high it is. Cascading debuffs is just a fact of life, I've seen Cimeroans nuke my Invuln's defenses from 45% down to -30% and that's WITH 50% DDR. Defense isn't a magical god mode, be aware of that and be ready to react to them by either kiting or popping inspirations. Or, in the case of an Invuln vs Cimeroans just ignore it and punch them in the face; all those debuffing attacks are Lethal after all and you're hard capped resistance to it.

You can buy the Attuned versions from the AH, they're the same price as the non-attuned and will always match your level, between the set's minimum and maximum. I do NOT recommend buying non-attuned as they're going to be a fixed level. As an example, Numina's comes from level 30-50. If you buy a level 31 then when you hit 50 it'll still be a level 31. If you buy it attuned then when you're 27 you can slot it as a level 30, and when you're level 40 it will be a level 40, when you're 50 it'll be a level 50. If you exemp down to level 30 for a TF then an attuned IO set will still give you the bonuses. If you bought a level 50 and exemp down below level 47 then the bonuses shut down. The nice thing about the AH is that when say a level 31 IO is listed the AH changes it into whatever level or attuned that the purchaser wants. You list a level 31 LOTG +recharge, Joe Blow then buys it as an attuned IO. The AH doesn't care what level the original IO was, it sells it as what the buyer wants. Long story short, ALWAYS buy your IO's attuned.

Never played Colonization but I spent many an hour with Civ 1-4 and even enjoyed Alpha Centauri. I bought Civ 5 and didn't like it as well. My favorite of the bunch is probably Civ 2.