jack_nomind

PK, there's an entire back-up of the public CoH forums in static form. Would it be easier to work with that -- or just instantiate them into a new BB?

The "best" pick is probably Degenerative, with Reactive a close second. Any of the DoTs are fine. I personally do like Diamagnetic, but rationally I know that only about 1/6th of the effect actually applies to anything I care about (EB or AV). That still knocks a couple percent off their hit chance and regen, but nowhere near enough to be game-changing. At the moment Degenerative isn't so popular that I avoid it, but Reactive is. If that starts to change, I'll probably just go with whatever DoT feels best for my character or the occasional Diamagnetic for a not-quite-softcapped character.

Add a singular "inherent power" button, and an intermediary layer to the Sentinel combo system. After X activations, the inherent power button is enabled. Once it's clicked, the next primary power activated will act as a finisher. The specific effects of that finisher could be the same for every power, or different based on which power it is, or only work for the first power, or etc. This would allow players to control their attack chain and still have the benefit of multiple types of Opportunity. (I prefer my earlier proposal because I think it does a better job of keeping combat fluid and improves Sentinel team role.)

I have to point out that you yourself just used "flag" to describe the counter, Leo. Highly informative. So -- what's the verdict? Can you add something to suppress the HasKheldian check in most missions? (It looks like a yes, since you could just add some other flag -- or counter, as the case may be -- enabled or disabled by Null which is checked first and exclusively if true. But I'm pretty rusty. The harder part would be ignoring that check in certain missions, as the OP suggested.) And if you can... do you want to?

"no get hitsu" also has an effective mitigation about half as good vs +4 AVs as a tanker at res cap for the relevant damage type so... y'know. there's that.

Reading through some historical CoH information for that most important of goals -- Winning An Argument On The Internet -- I came across this article which talks about the non-combat skill system that was supposed to give us gathering nodes for the purpose of doing gathering and... uh. . . numbers that go up? and instead eventually became Day Jobs and IOs. "Characters will be able to specialize in one of four different skill trees: Detective, Science, Communication, and Scholarship. They can further specialize in various areas of expertise, such as Forensics and Security for the Detective tree." Well at least he got it into Champions.

My proposal would be to combine/reconfigure both Opportunities into a singular version. It would do three things: buff Sentinel damage for a little while, apply a modest but stacking reduction to enemy Resistance a little for a very long while (5 minutes or more), and apply a (medium duration, nonstacking from same caster) effect such that anyone hitting that enemy gets a small heal and restore. This enhances the Sentinel team role to make them attrition fighters -- a Sentinel-backed team that can survive against any given AV will eventually win the fight by flooring the AV's resistance. This helps give them an identity beyond "weak but durable blaster." To give the Sentinel a little bit more survivability, triggering Opportunity could also have an unresistable Knockdown. It wouldn't preserve the "choice" aspect, but (leading post aside) one of the most common objections to the existing mechanic is that the choice interrupts the flow of combat for an AT that usually wants to stick closely to its rotation.

I don't think your powersets-as-legos analogy works here. Dominators were given Assault as a means of limiting them. Rather than being (easily) a ranged damage class with controls, a lot of their damage was put into melee despite them lacking armor or mez protection powers. On e.g. a Defender (or Corruptor), the Assault set would similarly hamper them. For this proposed AT the limitation of being in melee was addressed by changing the Defender-style support sets to include that armor component. To make this a case of powersets-as-legos, it might be proposed that we instead use Assault and traditional armorless Support, with perhaps a strong Inherent justifying the higher risk playstyle. Instead the approach seems to be to treat the powers themselves as the legos. That's what I meant by free-form. And it's certainly true that without a free-form system, some comic book superhero concepts are left out. We do already have more archtypes that have "assault" and armor powers, of course: all four EATs work this way. The reason I'd rather keep that approach to EATs is because their rigidity means they'll never just replace another AT the way for example "a corruptor, but with mez protection" like Melee/Ranged/Support/Armor would. We're watching the difficulty of "X but with mez protection" balance play out right now in players expressing their dissatisfaction with the weak team identity of the Sentinel. If they ever feel like they're doing the same damage as the Blaster, we'll see it again as people attached to their Blaster characters feel like they were foolish to play the riskier class when another one offered the same benefits. For the most part, I agree that most of the roles that can or should be covered, have been already covered by existing ATs -- the sole exception is melee/support. (There are a lot of combinations possible with pets, but pets are kind of a huge problem area for the game.) Maybe my response to that is a bit different than yours.

I'd really like to see 3-5 Kheldian epic pools, but I'd like them to be focused on expanding or reinforcing particular roles rather than just being "random stuff Khelds didn't have before." So, e.g., "Defender" pool: Ally Rez, Cone Heal, Mini-RA, reskinned Darkest Night, something like ML (maybe that shares the Kheld inherent effects w/ team). "Controller" pool: ST & AoE immobs, with -kb. ST hold, AoE hold something like Volcanic Gasses. Maybe an AoE stealth toggle. "Melee" pool: Mez and debuff resistance (not protection); some kind of mez-taunt aura; a parry and a follow-up style attack. "Pet" pool: probably something like Fire Imps at the low end and a decent lt pet of some kind at the high end, with basic support tools to use them in the middle.

I'm not particularly interested in either assault primaries or armor/support hybrid secondaries on non-EATs; and less yet for both. The traditional balance trades of CoH would make the resultant AT unable to do any job. Ignoring those metrics gives every overlapped AT an identity crisis. I'm all for a melee/support AT with a very strong identity and a good distinguishing inherent; I personally imagine something "paladin"-like, anchoring typical Support debuff toggles on themselves. A "domscrapruptor" just seems like an attempt to change CoH into a freeform system without respect for why ATs were implemented to begin with.

It's a nice even 17.

Perfect balance is impossible. Perfectly acceptable balance is possible, and a goal worth pursuing.

After testing it out for a while, I'm going to be dropping OG from my DA/Staff tanker. If my secondary had stuns (mace, KM, etc), it'd probably be great -- it would push the stun magnitude over what's needed to stun bosses. Right now it mostly just makes minions wander out of my auras. Nothing I've tested has suggested OG's stun stacks with itself, which would also make it work well. In response to the above comment, I've never really even noticed OG's hp drain. It's small enough as to be practically invisible on a tanker. I am planning to keep CoF. Both CoF and OG apply a mez, which means threat. (And they taunt, but as far as I can tell taunts don't stack from same caster.) CoF also applies a -tohit. Although Terror isn't the most useful mez (particularly in a kit with a damage aura), I'm ultimately content enough to keep CoF even without specific other synergies.

??? cardiac gives you nothing relevant to a farm build. agility and spiritual have recharge speed; musculature has +dmg (and end mod/run speed, if you want those). losing agility for cardiac in the build posted above drops you out of permahasten in exchange for about .27 end/s (equivalent to eating one small blue every minute and a half or so).

Working as intended. They're helpful at low levels, but beyond that that they were never intended to provide anything like a quasi-permanent buff. Although you can do some hilarious things if you're the right kind of defender.

I'd be in favor of new HamiOs (or equivalent) before a 'generic set.' But part of the game is that you will have trouble slotting things, and sometimes if you need a power to recharge faster and have more accuracy it takes two slots.

This is how the original armor sets all worked; they all have some kind of 'hole' or soft spot that has much lower mitigation than any other part of the set (invuln - psi; ice - fire and psi; sr - nonpositional; dark armor - energy; etc).

fiery aura or electric armor are the two worst secondaries you could pick for a solo scrapper leveling build. since you're pretty much going to be racing to kill as many things as you can before you go down, may as well lean into the aoe and go with spines/fire.

Cross Punch is a competitively high dmg cone attack if you have both Boxing and Kick. If you've got the space, it can add a melee cone to a set badly in need of AoE.

well, have i got an for you, then. I mean, I get it -- it's easy to look at a system and think it's impossible it was ever different, or ever could be different. But the game's been around for a while! If you take some time to learn about its past, you'll probably find out things you never realized.

AFAIK, the taunt duration factor is not 1 per 1s remaining. My suspicion is that it has very little to do with duration at all, but I should... actually just look at the code and figure it out.

Aggro evasion already makes this possible; you can't hold aggro on every mob on a map, but (with enough duration) you can Hold every mob on a map. I'd also like to point out that historically, CoH had no meaningful aggro cap until Issue 6 when it was set at 17 (down from, afaik, "float"). This is... wrong. There's no suggestion on increasing the number of targets affected by Burn or Fiery Aura. You wouldn't be able to kill things as fast as you can taunt them -- or any faster than you already can. There's also no suggestion to increase mez protection, despite your belief it must be. Tankers are going to have to deal with that issue organically.

You're mistaken about collision being 'introduced' at some point. Player/mob collision has always existed, although at different points in the game exactly what and how much things collide has been adjusted. (In fact, the "collision" mechanic is an irrevocably core part of the cryptic engine. As someone, I think Synapse, liked to say when people discussed wall running -- it's impossible in CoH because there are no "walls" to run on, only collision boundaries.) Players not colliding with each other was tested in an early issue, although I can't find the patch notes for it right now; I think around 5. "6 or 7" as you said is possible too. It was re-enabled, iirc in part due to player demand. It could be turned off on a mob-by-mob basis, which sounds time-consuming but not impossible. Personally, I'd prefer it were left as it is, but I could see an argument for reducing the collision on MM pets.

Huh. I remember live having a ton of AU/NZ players. Dunno if that would be any better for Japan than NA West, though.

I design my builds to be exemplar-friendly but they may not work for the actual leveling process. The typical levelling process is to respec once at around 20-30 and then again at 50 (sometimes many times at 50, based on budget and what you want to try out). In general, I recommend taking all attacks more or less as you get them before the first respec. If you skip anything, skip expensive AoEs. Armors can be a little flexible, but always take your mez protection power as soon as it's available (usually 10 or 16). You can generally greatly delay damage auras, since you won't be able to afford running them for long stretches anyway. Here's a rough sketch of a levelling build up to 30. Power slot levels are approximate. Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.962 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 31 Magic Brute Primary Power Set: Spines Secondary Power Set: Stone Armor Power Pool: Fighting Villain Profile: Level 1: Barb Swipe -- Acc(A), Dmg(3), Dmg(3), RechRdx(5), EndRdx(7) Level 1: Rock Armor -- DefBuff(A), DefBuff(7), EndRdx(9) Level 2: Lunge -- Acc(A), Dmg(9), EndRdx(11) Level 4: Stone Skin -- ResDam(A), ResDam(11) Level 6: Earth's Embrace -- Heal(A), RechRdx(13), RechRdx(21), RechRdx(23) Level 8: Impale -- Acc(A), Dmg(15), Dmg(15), EndRdx(17) Level 10: Kick -- Acc(A) Level 12: Build Up -- RechRdx(A) Level 14: Tough -- ResDam(A), EndRdx(17) Level 16: Rooted -- EndRdx(A) Level 18: Quills -- Acc(A), Dmg(19), EndRdx(19), EndRdx(21) Level 20: Taunt -- RechRdx(A) Level 22: Weave -- DefBuff(A), EndRdx(23) Level 24: Spine Burst -- Acc(A), Dmg(25), EndRdx(25) Level 26: Ripper -- Acc(A), Dmg(27), Dmg(27), EndRdx(29) Level 28: Crystal Armor -- DefBuff(A), EndRdx(29) Level 30: Mud Pots -- EndRdx(A) Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A) Level 2: Health -- Heal(A) Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A) Level 2: Stamina -- EndMod(A), EndMod(5), EndMod(13) ------------