dragonhawk777

I had thought of something along that line in the past, but that seems to be more of an epic archtype. I would probably give it the name Omni-blaster and have two versions. One would be elemental based so they would use the elemental based powers (eg fire, ice, water, electric) and electromagnetic (eg rad, power, electric,). Was thinking the beams they generate are more universal as far as damage type goes, but the player would select the effect associated with it. So fire leaves a dot, ice slows, electric drains stam,... when you get to that point where you have to make a choice in the spec it would be that you choose ranged or melee. Ranged would throw in control abilities added in and melee would get some armor related power choices. Both melee and ranged would have a mix of single target and aoe abilities to choose from. Anyways that is the rough outline of the idea I had. Elemental seemed the easier to add things to, but i think you could have more fun making an electromagnetic based one, as far a secondary effects go.

I already stated that if there is a power such as the blaster nukes which would be unbalanced with having two then you could restrict tier 9 powers to choosing just one of them.. So if it was a Fire/Ice primary the player would have to choose Inferno or Blizzard and once he did then he would be locked out from the other. Having access to other powers within the two sets is more of theme building rather than making an op character. Most of your blaster powers are pretty homoginized as far as damage output goes. Some like AR have issues due to the damage type they do and animation times, but overall most of the ranged attacks come down more to wanting either a bit more control (ice) or aoe (fire. water). So for most ranged dps sets I dont see a real issue. As for armor sets, if you are doing resistance sets then again its more of a theme, as most resistance sets allow you to cap any of the damage types you are very likely to encounter in a tf. For other armor types, as i pointed out in the post you are quoting defense based sets are at an overall disadvantage vs resistance sets. It is not uncommon to run into enemies in the higher end tfs that do some kind of defense debuff., rendering defense sets at a bigger disadvantage than resistance sets. So access to a defense based set and a set like willpower or rad would even the playing field with resistance based tanks. As for game difficulty. I am all in favor of the devs making level 50 versions of every tf in the game and scaling the difficulty so that they are a challenge to those with IO and incarnate powers. While I dont restrict myself to just upper level tfs, I do understand players not wanting to lose access to abilities they enjoy and worked to acquire. I would also like to see all the missions scale to whatever level you are also, so that they can be fun to do. Even if you dont pl a toon you wind up outleveling zones long before you finish all the storyline missions in that zone. I dont feel the answer is to make players go backwards, but rather give players options and advance the content for these at the level cap. As for new sets that took powers from two previous sets, that would be an improvement but I think it would be a bigger headache for the devs. I am betting you would a bunch of requests for why did they chose power 3 from set A and not power 3 from set B. It would likely be easier to identify problematic powers and just restrict them to a one or the other.

The Gaps are intentional. Every hero has a weakness. this is the balance eliminating them would make everyone far stronger than they are now I have tried those servers that allow free mode power choice while its very neat the characters are overwhelmingly strong so strong, combat loses all meaning. Games are boring when they are too easy and frustrating when they are too difficult. when the balance is found, so is fun Except that the game and instances arent balanced. There not any TFs where resistance does not provide sufficient mitigation that the power sets built in heal cannot keep up with the damage, except maybe Hammi. It is why the vast majority of tanks and brutes are not things lke ice, shield, sr,... They are just a bigger pain to use in higher end instances, unless you have a dedicated healer watching you, but since the majority of instance runs are pugs that is not a guarantee you will get one who knows you will need extra care. It hardly seems balanced when an invulnerable, fire, or rad tank can a lvl 50 tf easy mode, but a shield tank has to worry if the team has a healer who knows enough to stay close to him. Also I wouldnt call what Purgatory is doing or what I proposed is free mode power choice. The devs are choosing which 2 existing power sets they are putting together and you are only getting the powers within those two sets. So you could not take a tray full of nukes as a blaster, and at most you would get two nukes, I also have doubts that getting to choose between the powers of two power sets would make things too easy. The game was never hard to begin with, as evidence by the number of people who post builds that allow blasters to solo Chrimera on +4. So which power combinations would screw up the existing balance within the game?

I am not seeing much of a balance issue, particularly since pvp is such a small part of what players do in COH. The only issue I see could possibly be the ranged nukes, though since they were changed I dont think even they are a real issue. If though they were you could always code them so that a player could only take one of the nukes while having access to all the lower tier powers. Melee doesnt seem to have any sort of tier 9 abilities like the nukes so I dont see an issue there. Defensive powers I dont see anyone taking the tier 9 there as IOs usually cap out either defense or resistance. No real experience with pets like the MM have but if there is an issue with their top pets then they could be locked out also so you could only have 1. I see defensive powers giving players the best options, as it would allow players with defense based sets to also get a heal or buff up resistances some. There are some instances where defense based power sets are at a real disadvantage (eg Chrimera) and since defense sets quite often dont have a heal or high resistances they become fairly squishy. Overall I find the potential player options and gap filling far outweighs potential balance issues, which seem to have an easy fix of locking out duals of certain powers/tiers.

To my knowledge they did not, other than the devs on that server pick which power sets they are combining. So the player isnt able to just choose any four power sets. The devs have setup joint power set choices when you scroll through the power sets associated with an archtype. So if they did not put Fire and AR together in the blaster power sets then you could not make a Fire/AR primary blaster. However it has been my experience that there arent really any op powers in the game. Yes there certainly are powers that are considered to be better than others, but I not encountered any that would make any that would make any set overpowered. The amount of cooldown reduction you can get from enhancement sets pretty much already allows you to just cycle between the top 2-3 powers in a power set already, making weaker powers just an occasional filler in a rotation. If there happens to be a set that has a power that if it were combined with another set then they could just not put those two sets together.

On one of the other private servers they implemented some new power set options. They have joined various powers into a giant set. So for primary you could have both fire and ice in one power set. The same for secondaries so you could have like fire and regen in one big set. They dont see a balance issue due to the fact that you dont expand how often you can acquire powers.. So while you have access to both fire powers and ice powers you can still only take 49 powers. So if you took all the fire and ice powers you wouldnt be able to take many secondaries or epic powers. Is this something that could be done on the Homecoming servers?

My proposal haw two parts. 1) Add some new glove models that have wrist weapons mounted on them. Make a few options with bulkier weapons and others with sleeker weapons mounted on them. Deadshot is probably one of the better known examples of a character with gauntlet mounted guns. But we also have a number of character that have gauntlet mounted weapons. 2) Give all weapon based power sets have a arm mounted weapon option. This would include Beam Rifle, Pistols and Assault Rifle. I generally picture moving the starting point of the existing animations to by the hands like other powers are (eg Fire, Radiation, Ice,...). Considering weapons would be mounted on the top of the forearm, I would avoid hand animations that have the hand facing up and the palm showing as it would then look like you are shooting through your hand. Two other future options could be shoulder mounted weapons (eg War Machine) options and wrist mounted crossbow for Archery. The archery changes would also involve shrinking existing arrows to a size that is more appropriate for a wrist mounted crossbow though.

Two questions. Why did you use Musc Radial for Electric Blast and not for the others? You lower the damage buff from 45% down to 33%. I can understand using for a build where you are going for increased endurance drain, but if you are doing a damage test you should use the same Alpha Core for all of the power sets. The other question is you said that Irradiate is giving you a -resistance proc. The tool tips say that Rad does -defense, did they change it and not update tool tips, did you mis state the proc, or do you have an enhancement giving you a -resistance proc on Irradiate? Can you do a test with the Musc Total Core and show us where Elec falls with that core in the alpha slot? I havent run a parser, but I do have a bunch of blasters and my Elec blaster doesnt seem to be that far back from my other blasters. Granted they arent all using the same secondary but ever since the changes to Elec months ago it seems to be performing much closer to the top end primaries than your tests would indicate.

I made a Rad/Rad Sentinel and I found that the spec had enough builtt in melee abilities that it made picking up some more worth while. So Fire had some added melee abilities, particularly an pbaoe to add to Irradiate, Atomic Blast and Ground Zero. So I picked up Cremate and Fire Sword Circle, which makes my Sentinel equally good at either range or melee, and the Sentinels secondary means I can actually survive in melee. So if you are looking to round out your character some the epics can be useful. Trufully I would say that if your looking to round out your build the Sentinel epics are more useful than many other ATs. The Sentinel melee abilities are more useful and effective than a Blasters armor power is. The same for control abilities on melee ATs like Tanker. The only Tank epics that seem worth while are the ones that help with endurance

If you color it black it does reduce teh flame fx. I have a Elec/Dev blaster with flame shield and have the color set to black. It makes it look more like smoke than flames. It doesnt eliminate it but it does seem to reduce it as much as it can be. And even if I turn off Devices cloak power it still keeps the effects at a bare minimum.

I already have a Water toon, and Storm Blast seems to fit an overall weather control based toon. I do agree taht for overall dps Water is likely to do better than Storm or Electric as far as straight up dps goes, particularly on a team situation.

with the new Storm Blast set coming out I was thinking of trying out a storm/storm character. Does the Storm set (not storm blast) perform better on a Defender or a Coruptor? I know certain sets seem to perform better on defenders than corruptors and vise versa, but was unsure where Storm Summoning fell.

At one time the game had a built in chance to miss, no mater what level of accuracy you had. I believe it still does, so even if you have 200% accuracy on a power there is still a chance it can miss. Not absolutely sure but I believe it is a 5% chance to miss no matter how high your accuracy is. Also at one point the To Hit buff from target drone also affected Trip Mine so Device blasters could skip slotting Acc mods, but that was before IOs which have made SO slotting meaningless.

When it comes to the different IO sets which is better to do. slot up a set with boosters or use a Catalyst Enhancement on them? I have done the Catalyst in the past but never really saw a tool tip showing what benefit it does, unless you are talking about the class enhancement sets like Blaster, Brute,... Does anyone know which is better or even if either affects the set pieces. I know the boosters will bump up normal IOs to +5 and you can see how much of a percentage boost they get, but never saw any numbers concerning IO sets.

I have heard differently and that in some way they did tweek ED. Now whether they did or didnt is almost immaterial to the test results I did in the game, where I found that with 3 IOs in Hasten and boosting two of them to +5 gave me permahasten with my current build. I am not sure what the exact numbers are turning out to be but I am still under the effect of Hasten when the timer comes back up on it. I thank you for posting your build idea but I enjoy the ability to self heal when needed so I think I will stick my current pool picks. I also generally dislike Gun Drone because last time i tried it it acted as a clicky so I couldnt dismis it like I can VS. Im generally not big into pet classes in CoH so if I am going to have one I want it with as minimal fuss as I can and VS fits that bill more than GD does, and since they are both the same dps I will just stick with VS. Now my wish is that Homecoming would dump Time Bomb from the Device lineup and add in Seeker Drone. Change the tohit debuff to damage and that would be a great tier 8 power for Device. I would alter my build in a heartbeat to accomodate that ability.