Sovera

Superb going, Nihili! Wha tthe game calls 'a general' is usually someone of their retinue that wandered off. Next time check the spots where you killed the generals and you might notice a lone minotaur or cyclops standing there.

Blah. First attempt failed at the third mission. Being greedy cost me two missions just for the sake of trying to squeeze one last hit. To add insult to injury it was at the pack of enemies mostly composed of surgeons -_- It was not very bad though so I predict no unexpected results. Barrier carries me and the Fire/Claws killing speed makes short work of everything, even cyst packs and minotaurs. I did skip the ambush with the intention of coming back to it later, but for now I'm just focused in getting the buffed ITF done first. I'll try again tonight.

...so we have moved from butt capes to panty capes? 😛

A friend of mine trying to make an AE mission is struggling with the monologue options. Darn NPCs are supposed to talk when the PC gets close. But no, they unload all their text all over the screen (oooer) the second we zone in.

As someone who was building a new costume yesterday and was forced to hand wave losing the bio-luminescence stripes, when will we finally have the skin textures separate from the clothing options? We already have a 'skin' tab that is only used for skin color. Transplant all the darn skin options there. We can't have bio-lumi, scaley, fuzzy, organic, zombie, and etc more if we want to wear tights with skin, or wear fishnets, or wear skin showing gloves, or skin showing boots/shoes.

I tried not to quote too much but trying to snip something would butcher the message. I've been told in the past that cutscenes (in other games, not CoH) were necessary to give time for the engine to finish loading up resources and that was why they were not skippable. I take this with a shovel sized pinch of salt, but, lacking the technical expertise, I would not call those who say it liars. But if I log into the game and the world and all the players load around me I don't see why me crossing a threshold in a mission needs to trigger a cutscene for things to have the time to load. Regardless I would prefer a loading bar than a cinematic. On a tangent this conversation was had regarding the base macro. My own point at the time mirrored yours in that I, personally, don't come online to play and consider the travel times a riveting part of the experience. I agree it is part of the experience, but when it is the 200th time of playing ping-pong between IP and Talos then I give thanks I don't need to add 2-3 literal minutes of aiming my nose to the nearest tram, travel there, move to the other map, point my nose to the next mission, travel there. The base macro allowed to kill half of that. Or the infamous missions where we are at the butt end of the map, and told to travel to the ferry, loading screen, then to Talos. Then to the tram, loading screen. Then to Skyway. Then travel to the NPC to deliver two lines of text. THEN DO THE SAME BACKWARDS! Part of the experience? Yes, sure. The first three times. The next 197th times it would be a killer. Thank $deity we get the base macro to poof directly to Skyway and then back to Striga. Regarding more of the same I did a LRSF yesterday and was grumbling on chat. I MAY have skipped some mechanic I was unaware of, but it was good we had a second tank because I must have been phased 6-8 times during the fight against all the AVs. And it was a loooong phase. Unable to play. Unable to interact. Unable to save my squishies 😭. Unable to pop a breakfree and get out of it. Over and over twiddling my thumbs as I waited to be allowed to continue playing.

You're right. It won't be a magic solution. But we can't compare the ambush (30 or so bosses) with a normal cyst pack (10 or so bosses). The ambush is a huge thing that surpasses 99.99% of common content (where else do we get 30 actual bosses thrown at us in a single wave?). It's superb bragging material. But in the end it's a MotITF, not a master-of-running-in-and-killing-every-enemy-ITF. We already do these attempts either not fighting all the enemies and just running from oracle to oracle, or leaving every cyst with a sliver of HP and then destroy them all at the same time. Skipping the ambush is, IMO, just fine. Perhaps just mentioning whether or not it was done. As for how not trigger it it is not something I do since loads XP, but when unfortunately roped into surprise-it-is-a-speed-run! the way done is the moment we finish rescuing the oracles and leave the cave we immediately fly up. I believe the trigger lays in the group just before of the pack with the minotaur that is actually guarding the NPC so coming from behind avoids it. And I mean, heck, once you try it and if you manage to get past the cysts and the double AVs and the auto hit fluffies, nothing stops you from coming back and studying the ambush and how to beat it just for completion sakes. I know I barely managed it on my Fire Armor on regular +4x8 even with Barrier and it was only with the invulnerable Banished Pantheon pet sharing agro that I got it. But this was before I upgraded the build with the procs to up the killing speed.

The kheldian ambush is too much of a hurdle and tbh it should be considered optional for such a challenge since we can complete the ITF without triggering it in the first place.

HE LIVES!

If that is what you have extracted from all I've said, then carry on.

The reason game balance matters.... is the reason that shows up each time I go to look at old obscure MMOs and check what class to pick which is solo friendly, and invariably there is a 'Oh yeah, pick X, it is completely OP. You do great damage, are tanky, and get self heals, so you can solo dungeons. Everyone uses it'. The only thing that saves TW from being the only choice is how terrible it is at leveling and exemplaring, and requires funds to at least be able to cover a forum copied build. Without Momentum, without the endurance guzzling, then TW would be the sole choice.... and then yes, since there is not a lot to do and the leveling is fast then people would try new characters after a while of enjoying their brokenness, but I am unsure how many would find the game palatable after having delved into cheat mode where each hit obliterates NPCs *and* CCs them, *and* hits in AoE. Tell the the new player to try something like Katana afterwards and they would be like, 'Well... It's much faster. No big pauses. No endurance guzzling. It's really nice....' '...but?' 'But I'm hitting them and they aren't dying?' Heck, I get that after the procced out Fire/Claws Tanker and it is not exactly a community recognized power house.

While there have been several suggestions about upping the difficulty (such as running with buffed enemies) and using the other choices to make it harder (only AT powers, etc), the truth is that none of these add to the rewards. It is harder content for the sake of harder content. People do not progress from +0 through all the gamut until +4 for the sake of difficulty. They do it to increase their rewards. If +4 brought no benefits then the game would be played at +0 to finish faster in order to do more. This is a super common theme in Guild Wars 2 where despite the game being incredibly simple and easy the population is elitist to an incredible extreme fostering a very toxic subset of it. They want their dungeon/fractal runs done in exactly 2 minutes. If they take someone who does not know the strategy or does not use one of the community approved builds then they are ruthlessly kicked out or the team disbands if the run takes 3 minutes since every two runs they could have done one extra. We have completely skipped that (thank $deity). This is in part because of the AE. Now those who want to grind for hours can do so solo and not form groups who HAVE to run their Freak missions in exactly 3 minutes. But offering solutions for the heck of it does not work. How often is the extra difficulty used for regular play? At most I activate the 'must be done in X time' just to keep track of things and not for the extra challenge. Using the 'all enemies are buffed' would make an ITF take an extra half hour to finish and we end with the same merits and same inf. This is why the extra difficulty is never used. Now say each adds 10 merits, and the buffs all enemies turns into, dunno, 20 merits? They might not even be efficient but it would be something. My own suggestion of 'all enemies are now bosses' ramps up the difficulty by a fair bit (things do not die in a single AoE volley, they retaliate, when they hit back they hit a lot harder and since there is not just one but a dozen it can easily kill even softcapped squishies) but the rewards are substantial as well since a minion gives something like 8k influence and a boss 51k. The reward makes the extra danger and slowness appealing.

I think you have the wrong person, Mystic. I don't usually meddle with suggestion threads or set balancing, or even energy melee 🙂

Da sky is fallinnnnnnn'!

I read that completely wrong, but I'm not apologizing.

I went to level a Bio/Claws. Hmm... Squishy. Only level 32 though. Longbow and CoT tore it to pieces. But those because they debuffed defense (and since I'm leveling everything but my attacks is unslotted anyway). Council and the.. whatchamacallit.. Wardens something, the low level magic faction redside, they were nothing dangerous even with said unslotted shields. The damage does have that extra crunch, I can feel the -res and +damage working together.... but the QoL that is having a second low level AoE was missed waiting for Spin to come off CD each time. Nice and crunchy though. Theft of Essence works very well in DNA Siphon and I was surprised at seeing DNA Siphon heal so well on a tank. I'm used to it being a midling heal on a Scrapper if memory serves. I don't know if I will stick to it though since I've done Bio to death. I was thinking maybe use SR and abuse it to proc everything to the max though the thought of the endurance woes holds me back.

Yes. I do it all the time when I don't get a team to do it with. You're going to be downleveled to the appropriate level bracket anyway, but if you insist on doing it at the 'right' level bracket, then still yes. Then it depends on what you want to do. +0x1? You don't need a butt load of inf or a super duper build. The end boss WILL be an AV though but they are not super hard and you can stock up on envenomed blades from the P2W if it's a low damage AT. Most of the time you just need to stock up in medium inspirations before the last boss. +0x8? Yes, you're going to want a better build to do it in the low levels and even so the CoT part of Posi 1/2 will probably kick your butt since they stack so many debuffs.

I feel the same about Thor. From a stoic power house to a clown in a cape.

I was actually thinking of that one as I was writing the previous post. No no, Bill, the correct answer is: mmkay.

Mmkay.

...what? Brutes lag behind every other melee AT. They get no defensive bonus so the same slotting on a Scrapper will yield the same numbers on a Brute.Then they have crap for ATOs. Brutes are good for specialized farming. Scrappers kick their butts otherwise. You should not be throwing words like facts. Meh, plot device. Also plot device. When the writer wills it things happen. They can call it whatever they want. You know the feat where Spider-man defeated the Hulk? He made him laugh with a joke and he turned to Banner.

The answer seems to be TW. In fact the question is TW, and the answer is yes. Ultra damage and constant KDs seem to be the answer to everything.

- You need to think about what skills you're going to use. The ATO +res is important and you're not going to be spamming Spin in a single target situation. It also stacks three times and your S/L resistances are already overcapped with just one. Lower the S/L resistances a bit more and try adding more S/L defense instead. - You forgot damage/endurance in Focus. - Agility kills your procs. - Slash can be procced out for much better gains. - I have no idea why you have Hasten with only one slot, but Environmental with six. Well, I do, it's because with Agility it drops to 120 seconds. - +5ing everything is short-sighted. If you ever exemplar down further than 45 you suffer a catastrophic loss of near all set bonus apart from the PvP and purple ones. - No travel power is rough, but it's a choice. Consider something like this. 40% defense is enough for 90% of the content. When the going gets tough you use Barrier and softcap yourself. With Theft of Endurance DNA Siphon fills up your blue bar so you can trim down your slots for it (mostly because Bio is slot hungry as heck). Hasten is at 130 seconds instead of 120, but two FF procs mean it will be perma. With one ATO proc in Follow-up you have 77% resistances to S/L. With a second you get 83%. For 90% of the content this is fine but when the going got tough you used Barrier and now it's 88%, HP lowered to 90% and your Scaling Resists in Hover turned that 88% into 89%. This is the ATO did not just proc a third time adding another 7%. Focus with the Damage IO instead of the Damage/Recharge is on purpose to help the procs go off (40% with DMG/RECH versus 46% with just DMG). Swipe is just a mule (though helpful if you exemplar lower than 21) and rotation should be Follow-up, Slash, Focus. You can drop whatever you'd like such as travel powers and re-grab things you'd like such as Taunt and Assault if it's your thing.

You want to feel useful as a support? Roll a Plant/Kin. You are welcome to any team from level 8 to level 50. You make low levels safe with Seeds of Confusion. You heal the team. At level 20 you do all of the above but also boost their recharge and recovery (which is always horrid in the low levels). At 38 you also boost their damage while *still* keeping people safe and healed if need be.

I made this for myself but a friend from the game was interested so here it is. Even removing all the higher level IOs and not turning on Maneuvers it still has 42% defense at level 20. Perhaps not 42% *as* a level 20 since there are never enough slots as we are leveling, but I am going to say in the low levels it should be fine. As usual buy purple inspirations while leveling. A good tip is to leave 20-30 medium purples bids for a low price like 500 inf and keep playing, then /ah between missions and pick a few to restock. I have tried to abuse SR's ease of slotting and just go ham with procs though in the end Radioactive Smash needed a push to not have a gap, as well as needing the +res proc proc. So I sacrificed it and only lost about 25 damage but got a reliable place for the +res plus 10% recharge. The single target rotation ought to be something like Devastating Blow (6.6 recharge), Radioactive Siphon (1.8 animation), Radiation Siphon (2.4), Radioactive Smash (1.8). 1.8 + 2.3 + 1.8 = 6 seconds. Barring Force Feedback procs it has a 0.6 second gap which is ok in my book. In a team with anyone who throws a speed buff this goes down further. 59% S/L resists with one ATO stack. 66% with two. 72%-ish with three. If choosing Barrier then 77%-ish. Then the scaling resists kick in if/when reaching 50% HP. 40% E/N resists. Same math as above. Incarnates are a personal choice. With accolades and Musculature 45% the build has 3.69 EPS not accounting for the Performance Shifter proc and the Panacea. In my experience this is not really enough but there are the Recovery Serums from the P2W vendor to catch a breather. It frees the build for Barrier and adding another 5% resists on top of being a team wide panic button. SR is one that needs Barrier the least, I know. but when it needs it *really* needs it. The alternative would be Ageless (does close the gaps a bit, and fixes the endurance hole) or Rebirth for a more reliable heal. The build could do with more tweaks since I had not finished it: - Fusion comes super later at level 30 but I could not really fit it sooner. It could be taken at 26 instead of Quickness and relegate that one to 30. I would much prefer to have Fusion available before level 20 but... where!? One of the scaling resists could be taken at level 30 such as... maybe... the ranged one? Or perhaps the AoE? Scaling resists are not strictly needed in the low levels but they do give a pretty massive 10+% defense. So now we can see why I took Fusion so late. Of course this could be fixed by not taking Flight. Using something else would allow to take Fusion at 22-24. - I still feel I should have split Superior Gauntled Fist for the extra 6% to E/N but then I would need to place it somewhere which would spoil the no recharge attempt. - Defenses are 2.5% short for Incarnate content but I'm not OCDing about it.