Sovera

Call it whatever you'd like then. A 'feature' if you want. How can you possibly argue that is normal if the TF prevents us from leveling from the level with which we started it and then we are presented with an enemy 7 levels higher effectively being impossible to kill? IT IS JUST CODING! Lets not make this a huge impossible thing omg, hard coded into the system! Either the TF lets us level while we're inside (we were, I think, level 11 at the time, so the boss at level 15 would have been difficult but not completely impossible), or it PREVENTS THE TF TO START IF TOO LOW LEVEL TO COMPLETE THE TF! This is not rocket science. If lowest limit to defeat a level 15 boss is level 10 then up the TF's minimum to level 10. This is the LGTF all over again with a minimum level of 35 and then Hami spawning at 50. IT IS NOT MINIMUM LEVEL 35 IF WE NEED TO BE AT LEAST 45 TO COMPLETE THE TF! I accept it is a bug or an oversight, I'm just saying that it is there and is in need of being fixed in one way or another.

This bug is still active, guys. I duoed it today since no one else was interested and since both of us were level 8 we couldn't pass the leader to a level 15. Again we started at 8 and stayed 8 even as we leveled through the TF, but the boss spawned as a level 15 unlike the level 8 mobs surrounding. We had to cancel the TF again.

I was just about to come and post about what rotation did Ice/ stalkers use because I was stumped due to the recharges leaving either large gaps or making me waste my Hide proc on Ice Sword. I *was* thinking about using Frost in the ST rotation, but the 2.5 animation is a bit eeeeh. Or a lot eeeeh. It's against my religion to use such long animations <_< But yeah, I suppose Ice Sword, Frost, AS, Freezing Touch would be gap less with Freezing Touch replaced by Frozen Aura depending if we are doing AoE or ST.

I'm disappointed my improvised rotation of Guarded Spin with -res proc, Mercural Blow with - res Proc, Assassin's Staff for biggo damage fed by all the -res, Eye of the Storm with 3 combos for -res, ended up being 4minutes and 15 ish seconds to break a pylon. Removing Eye of the Storm for Serpent's Reach and wallowing in the -res and perma 15% damage of three combo points made it go down to 3minutes 20 seconds ish, and finally removing Guarded Spin for Serpent's Reach, Mercural Blow and Skysplitter ended being 2minutes 45. I don't like Serpent's Reach and Skysplitter though. It's one thing to do Guarded Spin and whirl around hitting things and another to do an aerial ballet before hitting them. I might still force myself to use Serpent's Reach for the ST rotation though since three minutes ish is acceptable. Ish. Edit: A second test with Guarded Spin, Mercurial Blow, AS, Serpent's Reach yielded 3:04 minutes. Obviously this depends on luck, procs both of hide and Build-Up recharge, but it's acceptable I suppose. In AoE situations replace Serpent Reach for Eye of the Storm. Re-edit: A last try with the above rotation and ageless T4 yielded 2:45.

You guys are all doing god's work! Thanks so much for sharing!

If you check HD you can check this for yourself. Just compare damage and recharge times and do some basic math.

As the title says. It is not a case of it seldomly working, or me not paying attention. Once I placed it in a different power it was going off multiple times as expected. I only had the normal version slotted in though, so I don't know if the superior version is working as intended.

Your feelings are valid and mine run in reverse. I *know* I'm not doing uber damages since my ST chain includes a T1 and two AoEs (and I'm someone who cares about this), and I *know* the animations are too long (and again I sing Claws' praise for being so smooth and fast animating), but even so I'm doing a high pitch eeeeeeeh during making kung-fu Jackie Chan noises at whirling my staff around. I did pick Stalker to help the ST damage. I shudder to think how it would be without AS to band-aid the set. As for the SR question. SR is just squishy and lacks a self heal. The DDR is nice, but not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. What hurts the most is /Bio though. Most my characters were /Willpower on live and despite 60+ alts and 6-8 months of CoH I have yet to roll a single /Willpower since it has to compete with /Bio which is great defense *and* great offense.

I've said this to trigger happy controllers when they mass immobilize before the mobs got close, which means they didn't get in range of my agro aura and are not hating on the Controller and on the loose. 'I know you guys want to feel useful, but wait until the mobs are close to unleash your AoE immobilize, please'.

This is why I am loving my Staff Stalker. My AoE chain and my ST chain are one and the same, so I click on a boss and keep hitting it while splashing damage ERRYWHERE! DIEEEEEEE! To be honest it is a character I haven't even felt the lack of an agro aura. Yet. It's not fifty and I'm still running +1x8 content.

Titan weapons for sure. That set does everything and that includes mystifying ST numbers and AoE. War Mace works very well too, and is second only to Titan Weapons. The AoE attack chain works like Claws. Claws is extremely satisfying to play and I'm surprised I didn't see it mentioned. Follow-Up, Spin and Shockwave (performed floating above enemies for maximum effect) is a gapless chain that rains AoE damage over and over until everything is dead. While Elec/Shield is lauded as *the* AoE set I've played it and wasn't impressed, nor do I really understand the panting the forums do about it. It has no early AoE so it exemps badly with only Chain induction to do the job. Thunderstrike is SLOW and while it may do the job as an AoE it also pretty annoying to run that 3.4 animation. And the master of the set, Lightning Rod, has a nuke's long recharge while not even killing minions on its own? The set also suffers from pretty mediocre ST damage. Same with Fire. One lousy AoE and it's a cone all the way to 26. Spines is *the* actual AoE set but the ST is weak and that makes enjoying it harder when we are whittling down a hard target. For some reason no one has mentioned Staff. Pretty amazing AoE truth be told. It suffers from the mediocre ST syndrome though. I made a Stalker of one to fix the ST and I'm pretty darn pleased about it since it exemps super well and rains AoE damage from early on. But Stalker fixes a lot of Staff's problem both by renewing Build-Up and fishing for Hide procs for crits on our skill of choice.

Everything seems to sort of be in place. You still have a large ish hole in Negative/Energy which is more important than Fire/Cold. I would personally lower the numbers to 40% and then use Barrier to fill the last 5% (while the numbers dwindle over time Barrier will always give a minimum of 5%). Remember that you can right click a IO, then place your cursor over it and press + five times to boost it. You can use it on Hasten, Ablative, Parasitic, etc, anywhere you aren't using full sets for the bonus.

I have yet to quit a single TF I've been in. Though I create the team in 97% of them and 'tank' them each time by popping insps and running in first. Sometimes I die in the earliest TFs, but meh.

Would it though? When was the last time we had someone at agro cap? I level new alts a LOT. I reach 50 and barely get my Musculature to T3 and I'm probably making a new character already to test something new. And I do them the 'hard' way which is TFs all the way to 50. I may step into a farm map to reach 35 (since one DFB and one TF of each, no repeats, invariably levels me at level 33) so that I can finish Numina and get access to ITF and LGTF. So when I'm speaking I'm not doing so from a spreadsheet but from hard experience, and my experience is that tanks, of any sort, are currently not adding a thing to the game nor do their agro caps have a bearing in the real game. We are not in WoW. Fights don't last minutes against tough hard hitting elites that kill a non tank in three or four hits. For those who never touched WoW pretty much any normal mob in a dungeon is our equivalent of an EB. This is not counting the bosses who are then AVs. Only a tank survives an encounter against a normal dungeon spawn and most times would die hard without a healer backing them up. THERE we need tanks. There it impossible to play the game without a healer. An off-tank is acceptable if the healer is well geared and the dungeon is run at normal or medium difficulty, but even then they can't faff around without agro tools because any normal mob citizen will three shot non tanks if they wander off. In CoH this isn't the case. My constant leveling is usually always at +1. +2 tops. No one ever willingly goes +3 while leveling and +4 is unheard of. Enemies melt in seconds even in these low level TFs. Boom, a rain of AoEs, bosses survive, lieutenants are at half HP for a few seconds more. There is no danger, no need for a tank and nothing for a tank to agro extra anyway. Then we reach 32 and any AT with a nuke is doing the same but instantly which means the following AoE volley finished everything. Then we reach 50 and the difficulty is finally upped to +4 with fresh 50s carried until they get their T3 to everything becomes +3. At this point it would take cherry picking a fresh 50 team to face failure. The closest might be the ambush of kheldians at the top of the hill in the ITF. That's the party killer since they debuff hard and are all bosses. In fact, this ends being the way to make tanks and TANKING relevant. Eliminate all minions in TFs. All enemies are now bosses. Perhaps reduce the spawn size by 1/4th. Suddenly getting hit hurts and it matters to have someone taking the brunt of it. This would do nothing at 50 when everyone is IOed to the gills but even then I'd welcome this additional difficulty slider added in. I think it would enliven the game by a LOT.

The guy does have a point though. If we dropped Tankers from the game and just gave their AoE punchvoke to Brutes no one would even notice except die hard Tanker fans and new players who come from holy trinity games who'd gravitate to them by reflex (only to later learn they are gimped Brutes). The difference from Scrapper, Stalker, and Brute is already paper thin, (and even now it's not about making the AT different from the other three but just upping numbers so it is *more* similar to them) but at least the Brute can say it takes the role of tank by dint of 90% resists once all buffed to the gills. Of course this being a community there would be a tremendous outcry if such a thing were to be done. The only way to make Tankers more valid is giving them Tankers only sets. Want to play a holy shotgun set? It's only available to Tankers. Want to play a Throw Cars set where every move is picking up a car and throwing it at the enemy? Gotta roll a Tanker.

Yes, even at level 33 and not nearly slotted up the attack chain works fine already and actually I can leverage Eye of the Storm with Hide. I threw the character at a Comic Con to get the last two levels so I could do Numina and it performed *admirably*. Only +1x8 and having to munch on two purples once in a while. So basically start in hide, Eye of the Storm, Guarded Spin, Mercurial Blow, AS (saved for last to apply the last combo point and fish for a Hide proc), Eye of the Storm. From then on just continue doing the same and any Build-Up procs I saved for before AS to apply extra BOOM. Since AS animates ultra fast we are still within the 5 seconds of Gaussian to use EotS empowered by three combo points + Hide + Build-up + Gaussian proc + Force Feedback proc. Verrry nice. Remember to float above the enemies to get more juice out of Guarded Spin. It means I have Sky Spliter and Serpent's Reach taken and slotted in my build but not used since I use this chain for AoE and ST. AoE because AoE, ST because Guarded Spin has -res proc, Mercurial Blow has the other -res proc, three combo EotS does -res as well, and AS is the linchpin wallowing in all that -res every five seconds.

That said I'm running a Staff/Bio Stalker and woof woof, me likes. Even not having an agro aura is less a problem than usual. I even tossed it into a farm map at level 33 (to reach 35 and be able to do Numina) and it came out just *fine* unlike my poor Fortunata whose SR based defense and only having Aid-Self couldn't handle it (not that normal gameplay involves this sort of stress testing so it's just a personal metric).

I had an MM with me today and it reminded me how the poor things can't keep up nowadays. Pets moving at Sprint level simply stay behind and arrive when the fight is about done.

I'm leveling a Staff/Bio. Surprisingly interesting. I had been wanting to try a Staff/ but always put off by the supposed low ST damage and of course that Stalker was the answer to that. I wanted to try an Elec since supposed masters of AoE but eeeeeh, even after cooking a build I looked at it and wasn't impressed. Only AoE at low levels would be Chain induction, Thunderstrike has an abysmal animation time and Lightning Rod didn't impress me on me Elec/Shield stalker with the damage/recharge ratio. Staff has been lovely. Start in hide, open with the PbAoE, hit a hard target with AS, follow with Guarded Spin. AoE galore! FF proc in the PbAoE ensures swiftness. AS and the PbAoE recharge about in the same time and thus make it worth it to wait the small gap and AS something first to fish for a hide proc. I used Guarded Spin and the T1 for my ST rotation since both can take the -res. It's all about empowering AS and churning out AS as much as possible. I still have a gap even later on so I'm going with Serpent's Reach but the animation is too long to use for regular play so it's reserved for AVs. Mostly because I don't want to AS, T1, Guarded, T1, but as I level I might end up doing that and ditch Serpent's Reach. Dumb 2 second animation is contrary to my religious beliefs. In the same vein I took Sky Splitter but have no intentions of using it. Dumb *three* second animation. It would need to do triple the damage for me to consider it. Or to reverse the combo effects. I don't need extra res on ME, but the target taking -res is acceptable so I might see if AS, Mercurial Blow (-res proc), Guarded Spin (-res proc), Eye of the Storm (PbAoE with 3 point combo doing -res), makes for a decent attack chain.

Pretty much. But it's effing amazing to be damn invulnerable as soon as level 25-28. The problem is also that it instills a false sense of strength. We are fighting +0 as we go and the hits that come in are weak because of being +0, Then we fight an AV or even EB, or the difficulty is cranked for some reason such as joining a +4 while not still 50 and suddenly those love taps are hammer blows.

It really is. You just pay for it in squish and lack of self healing, though both can be worked with.

You can still shuffle things around and keep Parasitic up up half the time on three slots while keeping Ablative well slotted. But it doesn't matter if you +5 the slots you put on Ablative as long as the raw stats are there. As for Genetic Contamination it does more than just damage, but again, -res proc and the Scrapper ATO that passively increases critical chance. That ATO split in half is 5% S/L x 2 so from those you'd go from 25% S/L to 35%, and from there adding a Superion Blistering Cold and poof, 40% S/L. Barrier takes care of the last 5% and no need to do Shadow Meld's 3.2 second animation every 15 seconds.

That does appear to be a squishy build until reaching Shadow Meld, I can see why you'd be hitting panic buttons. Just some quick tips: Panaceia proc will do more than Numina's. Don't forget to +5 your recharges in Hasten (open the IO window, then press + five times). Ablative is your first (and usually only needed) line of defense so I'd switch the slotting between it and Parasitic Aura, then do the same +5 trick. Genetic Contamination could do with some slotting and it takes well the utility procs like the -res and scrapper ATOs. I posted a Claws/Bio recently down below which could have some pointers for slotting.

Mind posting your scrapper version build?

Whaaaat!