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dragonhawk777

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Everything posted by dragonhawk777

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 1. You are off on generic IO as crafted 50 gives a 42% reduction vs 38% combining SOs. Plus since the Homeecoming team turned off or reduced the ED penalty that the game put in years ago its definitly more beneficial to 3 slot Hasten. I tested ingame and the Hasten downtime is down to about 10 sec so its downtime is not as severe as you think. 2. I did chage the settings and yes damage numbers are closer. I have also changed some things so my mids buid is a little different than my live build as I put Ragnarok in Zapp and put Obliteration in Trip Mine. 3. Your choice you complained about endurance issues and I have no idea what you keep running, so I generally operate on the assumption that if you have multiple travel powers they are all running. If you arent then my only suggestion is move some of those healing enhancements out of FO and put some endurance ones in it. As I said I dont ahve any endurance issues on my blaster or any of the blasters I have made, and hte list is pretty long 4. I disagree on your ranged def assesment. I have found that ranged is sufficient in nearly any instance unless your blapping. I also take Bonfire on my nonflying blasters though so the only thing that will get within melee are EBs and and AVs (unless I get sloppy and forget to use it). Even bosses have no knockback resistance so I can keep even Cimerorans bouncing away from me on a regular basis.. If my blaster is a flier like my Fire/Rad blaster then its generally not tough to keep out of melee, barring some specific cave maps, even on speed runs. One of the issues with Cimerorans is that they have some kind of a def debuff around them so slotting for def of any kind in reguards to them is always tricky. My defense based stalkers and brutes always have a much rougher time in there than my resistance based ones. My fire brute lasts longer than my shield brute on that run normally. 5. I prefer Barrier becuase you are getting defense and resistance as a buff and you start out at 95%. Plus with blasters ability to still shoot lower tier abilities if mezzed I dont bother with Clarion barring specific instance like the Underground trial. Never took Ageless on a blaster due to never having End issues. Tried Rebirth but got more use out of Barrier, so I generally use taht as my default, but to each thier own.
  17. I looked at your build on Mids and compared it to mine in terms of raw numbers. I have a lvl 50 Elec/Dev laster as well as a Elec/TA blaster, an Archery/Dev blaster and an Elec/Trap Corruptor and the only one I ever run into the occasional endurance issues is on the Corruptor, and even that isnt too bad. So in terms of numbers your build has better recharge than mine but taht is about it. Ranged defense are about equal (33.65% vs 34.06%) and recovery I am at 251% vs 241% on you. Power wise though I am running with considerably higher numbers than you are, which is making Valtanic Sentinel much better to run as a taggle. For example Mids has your Zapp at 371 damage and mine is at 1311 damage. Lightning Bolt is showing 304 for you and 541 for me. Your VS is at 110 and mine is 208. The recharge difference is coming up as a 1 sec difference in Zapp between our builds. You also have a considerable number of toggles, which could be some of your endurance problems. I am wondering why you have so many travel powers and why you have Tough and Weave? With Devices you dont have any melee attacks so there seems little reason to worry about improving smash/leathal defence as opposed to to just maxing out ranged defense. You have 0 reason to ever get within melee range of an opponent and with Fly you can stay out of range easily on most maps (excluding cave maps of course). I would consider focusing on staying either ground based or airborne, then you can cut down on your travel powers and toggles some. Here is the data link for my build if you want to compare and tweak yours in some way. If yo are wondering about my Self Heal choise I have found that it works well with keeping me alive, both solo and if I am not near a healer. Combined with Barrier it provides me with a fairly reliable way to heal myself on runs, but that is a personal choise and i realize it isnt optimal for dps. https://www.midsreborn.com/builds/download.php?uc=1420&c=660&a=1320&f=HEX&dc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
  18. I was thinking that also. Even if you get buildup down to always being up you still have the global cooldown from activating it. Plus you can slot TD with the Gausmmanns set which can proc Build up perieodically.
  19. So I was looking at Mids and playing around with different builds on it and noticed some things that had asking this question. So in overall dps which worlks out better Target drone with its constant 20% damage buff or Build up with its clickable 81% buff? Obviously for added burst damage the 81% beats teh 20% but for an overall run it would seem that Target drone would provide an overall damage boost for the run. Thoughts on this?
  20. I take into account those things, which is why I put as much copy and paste aspects as I can. The idea though is always going to come first, not whether or not the devs will impliment it. I have simplified ideas in the ppast and seen nothing come of it, like where I proposed they remove Time Bomb and replace it with another ability. Either an existing one like Seeker Drone or a new power that uses existing mechanics like being a targeted AoE (Sticky Bomb), and Time Bomb is probably one of the most hated and least taken ability in the game. Be they be a part time dev team or a full time team working for an established company, I never hold out much hope that an idea will actually get implimented, no matter how well the idea is recieved. So rather than a discussion on whether or not the devs are actually going to impliment the idea, I would rather have a discussion on the pluses and minuses of the ideas mechanics, such as your issues with animation time differences. Your animation time issues are I believe a non issue as you are looking at a 1 sec or less difference in animations. When I see issues being brought up on the Defender/Coruptor forums it is rare to nonexistant that I see things about a certain set is bad because of using bow animations as opposed to a hand wave animation. What seems to be a bigger issue with a debuff is on whether or not you can keep the debuff on the target rather than debuf A has a 1 sec longer cast time than debuff B. One of the reasons why you see more Rad defenders vs dark defenders is because Tar Patch is a location AoE taht mobs can and do walk out of vs Enervating Field which is targeted and stays on the target no matter where he moves to. The fact taht debuffs typically last more than 30 sec means that the primary issue is the abilities recharge (for future applications), how well the ability debuffs the target, and if it allows you to do other things or do you have to micromanage its applications.
  21. All the development would basically be in the leveling process, when you see the trainer. I am not sure how much of a change this would be from a programming standpoint, but i do not believe it would qualify as reworking the game. From a player standpoint you would only be seeing a difference when you visited the trainer and then you have basicaly an added screen if you select a power from the secondary set, or each secondary power would have the three options and you just have to select one of them. As far as animation times go I dont see that as a factor because all the powers with diferent animations are debuffs and not attacks. Yes for attacks animation times certainly does play into the mindset of a percentage of the player base, but this does not seem to come into play for debuffs. Debuffs biggest factors seem to be more centered on how good the numbers are and how well it stays on a target or group. That was what i was thinking when I set them up so each option has the same targeting mechanics. So you wont get one option where its a location aoe for one option and a targeted aoe for another option. I kept the to real attacks in the set (Trip Mine & Power Blade) all the same and wont have any animation differences.
  22. This isnt so much of a new power set as it is more of a fully customize of existing powersets. The initial try with this woul be centered on the Tac Arrow, Traps, Devices power sets and come up with a merger of them to give players more theme options. You would still have nine powers in the set but the difference is that each power would have three options to accomodate different weapons. DCUO did something like this so that you could select fire but still use a bow or a gun or have it fire from your hands. So all the powers will have an option based on it being used with your characters hands, with a bow, and with a gun. So to demonstrate with the first power Electrofied Net. In all its forms it would still immobilize and do a small amount of damage. So with the first power you would get three options: Electrofied Net Grenade: Thrown with hand animations. Electrofied Net Arrow: Shot using bow animations Electrofied Net Launcher: Shot using gun animations. The initial sets are for blasters, defenders, and corruptors, and since it for all of them it will be light on melee attacks and will focus more on debuffs, control, and buffs. Defenders/corruptors usually have a heal so at level 20 you will get a power difference so they will get a heal, while blasters will get their power that boosts recovery/regen. Other than that all the powers can be shared but the numbers will change depending on the AT. So the blaster version would have the lowest debuff number, but have the highest damage if the power does damage. Defenders would be the opposite end with them having the highest debuff or buff numbers but will ahve the lowest damage numbers. Electrofied Net Grenade/Arrow/Shot: Immobilizes and does a light dot damage. Caltrops/Glue Arrow/Glue Shot: Location AoE -speed, -recharge. Acid Grenade/Arrow/Shot: Ranged target, -defense, -resistance Seeker Drone/Flash Arrow/Dazzling Shot: Targeted AoE, -to hit, - perception Field Operative: +Stealth, +Defense Target Drone: +Recovery/Regen, +to hit, +damage. For blasters only. Healing Grenade/Arrow/Shot: Targeted AoE heal. For defenders and corruptors. Trip Mine: Remain unchanged, no options. Stun Grenade/ESD Arrow/ESD Shot: Targeted AoE stun. Power Blade: Melee damage, -resistance, +stun. Animation options are the blade from the Psi power set or the Vanguard energy sword. In the character creation if you chose the power set you would have a number of weapon options available. So you would select the type of bow you would use and which gun type (Pistol, AR, Beam) and style you want to use. These would only come into play if you chose a power that corresponded to that weapon type. You can also mix and match if you wanted to make a character that carried a variety of weapons. So for example you could choose Glue Arrow and also choose Arrow Shot. Animation wise you would use bow animations for Glue Arrow and AR or Pistol animations for Acid Shot. The idea of the set is to give the player options to make concepts taht dont lock you into specific power animations. So if you were making a character that used a bow for his primary but didnt want all his secondaries to be tied to his bow like TA does, but did want some of them. So he might take Electrofied Net Arrow and Glue Arrow, but also take Seeker Drone and Stun Grenade, because their concept is an archer who also uses a variety devices besides his bow. Considering I was proposing some pretty new power selection mechanics I thought I would make it as easy on the devs as I could with mowers and animations. All the animations already exist in the game so its chiefly a matter of blending them all into the single power set. Sets like Traps and Devices also dont have a bright or dark option so the devs dont have to worry about programming in options for that. If the idea worked out we could look at expanding it to cover other power sets like energy, dark, or the elemental based powers.
  23. Yes it is. I have one andit does good. For a while it was my main though swapped over to elec/tac arow for the new one i am focusing on.
  24. Force isnt bad if you are building for an all ranged or primarily ranged blaster. I currently have Fire on my Arch/Dev blaster but have worked with Force in the past, and may go back to it. Temp Invul is your typical resistance armor that is similar to all the other sets. Overall I generally view any blaster armor as a spot to slot the global def buffs like Gladiators Armor and Steadfast Protection. Unless you are really trying to build for resistance blasters dont normally get enough resistance to ever save them.. You can though build a blaster to achieve a good aount of resistance. Both Repulsion Field and Repulsion Bomb have a good amount of use if you use them wisely. Yes they can be a pain in groups, but if your groups have a habit of people going their own way it allows you to solo large groups fairly easily. Bosses are subject to knockback at a lower intensity than things like holds so you can toss them around without having to apply multiple attacks,like having to cast two hold attacks to hold them. In a place like ITF you can go down a side tunnel while your main goup is going down another and clean out the tunnel solo. The constant knockback animations can keep mobs tied up and not attacking you, making you nearly invulnerable. Both Fire and Force have powers that share this effect and I have used Bonfire with very good success in places like ITF. Force has Personel Force Field and Fire has Melt Armor. Now both can be duplicated with different Incarnate abilities but Melt Armor will stack with Interface Reactive Core which can give you -20% resistance debuff. PFF wont stack with Barrier and PFF doesnt let you attack while its on, so overall Barrier is better. I will say that if your a blaster that picks up the Medicine pool then PFF is a great way to insure Aid Self doesnt get interrupted, and its recharge means that unlike Barrier its available whenever you need it and has no diminishing effects. Fire also has teh self rez vs Force of Natures god mode. Generally the self rez is more useful for blasters, which is likely why you dont see to many people with Force. From my experience you get a bit mroe utility out of Fire, though if you are soloing large groups having the constant knockback field can be very beneficial.
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