MistressOhm

Blasting is Damage First and Crowd Control second. Also known as "Own The Battlefield" such that the best Defense is always Insurmountable Offense. (These silly Sentinels, thinking they can just blast-scrap their way through, no finesse. Hmph.) ------------- In all seriousness, being a Blaster means knowing what you're up against, taking on the biggest threat to your own survival and dropping it quickly, while keeping everything else from mobbing your glass-cannon ass... whups! no, you don't get to hit me, I'm not done with your boss yet, STAY THERE until I'm ready for you! And so on and so forth.

Please let it not be a complete cluster**** like the second movie, that basically got retconned/ignored/written out of the lore by the series AND the third movie.

The naming "expire" policy (currently only as a little 'warning' tickmark next to the character in the list) leverages idle time since last login AND character level. If it's a low-level character, then the policy kicks in sooner, than it would on a high-level character. I don't know if there is a character level that is completely immune (as in, "50's will always keep the name in perpetuity with no login / play required"). Currently the HC team is still working on the "balancing" and has yet to actually turn on any mandatory renaming or name availability/expire times. All you'll see is the warning tickmark, stating that IF the policy were fully in effect, you COULD lose a name if you don't play the character Soon(tm).

Someone said this back in the Live days, and it's got a few grains of truth to it: "Defenders Benefit the Team" - the powersets are designed so that they 'force multiply' what the team is doing. "The Team Benefits the Corruptor" - while the powersets do have 'team' benefits, they also leverage the team's contributions to 'force multiply' what the corruptor is doing.

Ice/cold dominators do fairly well, since can lockdown with the primary and then unleash pain and suffering with the secondary. Not as "tanky" as other archetypes, but you learn to pace yourself, take down small fry until Domination fills, then go after the big targets.

Well... given that this is a game... I'd... not make that assumption! 🙂

Well... let's be fair... the power plant at Terra Volta is doubly protected (war walls within the IP war walls) and yet... it's complete chaos in there. Maybe the second layer of war walls was to keep the villainous elements IN.

Indeed, this. Proc for stun, or knockdown, or even a hold, it's extra PBAoE crowd control in a can.

If you solo, Kinetics can be a bit of a slog. If you're a team player, you're the one bringing the beer and pizza to EVERY party, even more so than Empathy or Force Fields.

When a young hacker makes a connection between magic and mathematics, and uses what she's discovered to write a sorcerous computer program, all hell breaks loose, and the Midnighter Club needs someone to investigate. Level Range: Low 30's, lower-level characters may find the content challenging even if level-adjusted. Enemy Groups: Crey, Family, Sky Raiders, Carnival of Shadows, Tsoo, Circle of Thorns Focus: Hero/Vigilante Keywords: SFMA, Magic, Sci-Fi, Mystery Contains 1 stock Boss (no EB's), but last mission is an "escape" with ambushes and patrols on the way out.

Moooovin' to Montana sooon... gonna be a dental floss tycooon....

I'm going to have to limit use of this to instances (lest I annoy the s**t out of other players), but I've discovered that with the right binds, there are certain powers that behave like a mad bull rush, but mechanically work the same as a teleport. Which means charging through walls or furniture. Ran an entire mission arc with a friend tonight, in character, doing some light banter whilst taking out 5th Column (always fun, beating up Nazis), and suddenly I'm looking for all the different ways I can use this ONE power to do something awesome other than just "leap into a spawn and knock everything a$$ over teakettle". And my friend was LOVING it. I was throwing out pop references, including the SNL Landshark's famous "...candygram" before charging thru a doorway, etc etc. Great fun in a roleplay sense, simply being Comic Book Awesome and more than a little silly. Did I get cool points with the roleplay crowd? No, because they didn't see it. Did we enjoy a couple of hours? Definitely.

Y'all are making this WAY too complex for me. I like to keep it simple. Every powerset is a basic 'Thing You Can Do' and as you get better at it, you can do that thing differently. Let's say for example, you're an Elec/Elec Blaster. You start out with one offensive ability, zapping something with Charged Bolts or a Lightning Bolt, and one control ability, usually Electric Fence which is an immobilize. Other than Brawl and maybe some Prestige toys, that's all you know how to do. It's not a matter of how much power you put behind it, because in the right company (sidekicked to a 50) you can really put the hurt on something... but you still only can zap, and immobilize. As you level up in the game, you learn how to do more things with your abilities AND you also get the chance to fine tune them (enhancement slots). Again, we're not talking about levels of power, but levels of control and imagination. You're still just slinging electrical effects around however. As Power Pools and Epic/Patron Pools open up, you do gain other abilities, but again, they're pretty limited. Jumping pool doesn't let you heal people, and Leadership can't get you across town faster. So how does this relate to roleplay? I tend to treat other players the same way we treat "level-less" mobs (like giant monsters, and add spawns like all the Clockwork building the Paladin). To them, it doesn't matter what level you are, they'll match you in that regard. What does matter is, how many variations on a theme can someone play with their limited selection of super abilities? And then to play on that a little further, do they focus more on status effects (defender or dominator) or simply breaking stuff and laying opponents flat (blaster, corruptor)? You can go into motivations, ethical limits (if any), and so on. But as long as you have the focus of "A Level 50 Is More Powerful" you're severely limiting yourself to the RP you can engage... because that mechanic becomes a stumbling block for the necessary 'suspension of disbelief' that any fantasy, sci-fi, superhero, horror, or even slice-of-life RP requires. And yes, Incarnates are a problem, because as part of the lore, the Incarnate has taken on aspects of the Well of the Furies. They ARE becoming cosmically powerful. BUT, the Lore also has a warning label - dive into the deep end too fast, and you lose track of who YOU are, what YOUR goals and motivations are, and become simply another agent for the Well. So. as you level up those Incarnates, slot more potent variations of the ones you've chosen, don't lose track of how you got there, and who you were (and hopefully who you are) when you started.

Lets be clear, though. Even at their most heavily used time of day AND time of year (seems people show up more often during holiday events), none of these servers match the populations of the Live servers. So "more crowded" is extremely subjective. The flip side to that is, I'm not sure HC is running these on servers that match the hardware or bandwidth that NCSoft was using, so 100 people on Everlasting might be using the same server capacity PERCENTAGES that 1000 players placed on Freedom. I'm not privy to the specs, so couldn't tell you if this is true or not, or to what degree. I do believe that HC dev team did 'downsize' the servers and network connections, as they are leased from a third party and thus they (like Liberty Biberty says) "Only Pay For What You Need".

This isn't going to be a treatise on a Shield Tanker build. Instead it covers one power, one ability, which is Shield Charge. Animation wise, this is basically your Tanker 'leap in and knock everyone down' power, BUT, it acts like a very short Teleport, that also throws a Knock on any mob in the line of travel AND as an AoE Knock at the endpoint. This means that you don't need Line of Sight for it to work, nor do you have to worry about pathing. Normally this is a "click someplace and jump there" power BUT, with the right bind and the ability to target-lock something, you can really have some fun. KEYBIND: SHIFT+` "powexec_location target Shield Charge" This leads to the following mayhem (all shown off during the Ubelmann the Unknown arc): Smashing through intervening boxes, crates, shipping containers, and other scenic elements Smashing downward through balcony floors Smashing upward to balconies from floors below Smashing through intervening walls or berms (!) Superhero landings by triggering the ability "out of range" and then hovering down until it animates Knocking a crowd of mobs off a cohort, by charging to them. At one point I'd whacked a Nightwolf Champion upwards to where he'd gotten stuck in the 'grid' above the reactor area (in the Portal Corp Ubelmann map) and as he worked his way free, now above the grid, I launched myself upward through the grid to knock him on his butt again. My Corruptor cohort was enjoying the show, a lot. I am sure that a Villain using such an ability during a Mayhem mission could accomplish a LOT of collateral damage simply by lining up all manner of intervening stuff and then charging to whatever's at the limit of range, through everything else. Unfortunately, that's the only way I can think of to accomplish actual 'breaking of stuff' as the regular instance maps don't have breakable walls or objects. (Yet?) You might be able to simulate it with the physics objects you get from dumpsters and the like, or summoned objects from a Gravity controller. What other things have y'all done with these 'charge into the fray' abilities?

Yes, the XP Boost has been fixed. Rather than multiplicative (double XP) it was additive (1+1=2), and that meant that AE's nerfage of XP to 0.5 meant that the XP buff didn't restore that to even keel (0.5 x2 = 1) but instead tripled it (0.5 +1 = 1.5).

It looks like something in Cyrillic, which leads to "In Soviet Russia, Car Warranty Reaches YOU."

... well Jareth was played by David Bowie, so was there any question? 🙂

Thank you! Post corrected. Practical upshot is still much the same, however - as Def gets debuffed, attacks are more likely to land.

In answer to the Cosmically Overpowered besting every challenge simply because they can use their abilities as Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot with his sword, there's a specific trope: "Nice Job Breaking It Hero". This is the "simple solution" that more often than not results in a Bigger Problem. The villain WANTED someone to come along and just push the damn button, or blow up the computer, or (insert random destructive action here). Which means that if you know Hero X is predisposed to just throwing their powers around to solve problems, you as the narrator need to set things up so that finesse is required, not a god-mode flex and we're done shooting for the day. It's too bad that you can't write an AE arc where doing something like blowing up a destructible object FAILS the mission... because then I'd seed the map with a few destructible copies of the "click on me to accomplish something" object, so that Figuring Out Which Doohickey To Work With becomes the object of the mission. No, don't press THAT button, it launches and then detonates the world-cracking missile. That Would Be Bad.

Goddess keep the treasure that is Brian Blessed. And yes, he was ALSO the voice of Boss Nass (Phantom Menace). Therefore... "MEEEEEEEEE.... like-a dis!!! BRBRBLLLE!"

Cauterizing Aura is likely the same as the Elec blaster's Sustain field, can't recall what it's named now, but it replaced Lightning Field which used to be just a melee-range DoT. It increases the blaster's regen and recovery rates, and does a minor bit of End Drain on mobs along with trivial damage. Consume = Power Sink (a PBAoE that sucks endurance from nearby mobs to replenish the caster's End bar). The more mobs it hits, the more End gets recovered. I'm sure other blaster primaries also have variants of these.

There's a badge there, that basically outlines the perpetual construction as someone's pet project. (It's probably just another apartment complex, or a new office building.)

I'm actually liking the story content written for the Vigilante alignment, not just the side-switching tips themselves, but actual arcs that cater to those who are "morally flexible". That, and I always thought that "arresting" mobs by using what would be considered lethal force was a bit of a handwave.