Pixie_Knight

Not in my family. It's not nearly witty enough for a Dad Joke one liner in my family. Nor does it have a punch line that isn't obvious. Which isn't to say groaners never happen. They are just of higher quality. Or they play on the fact the other person is an idiot. As an example of the last type, my dad was once waiting for the pizza he'd ordered from a local pub that makes really good pizzas but doesn't deliver. He had with him a hot/cold insulation bag to put the pizza in for the trip home. As he waited some incredibly nosy woman asked him what the bag was, so he told her it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. Simple, understandable, and exactly what the bag it's self says in big easy to see and read letters. The woman next asked what he had in it, a question which was none of her business. Without missing a beat Dad told her "A cup of coffee and two Popsicles." She believed him, and everyone else that heard his answer started laughing. When she realized the joke, she got rather angry and stormed off due to being made to look a fool.

You keep making the exact same mistake. You keep assuming every Dark Blast power is a damage over time. They aren't. There is one damage over time attack in Dark Blast. And it is a cone attack, not a single target one. So let's take your (flawed) analogy. I'll explain why it's flawed in a moment. You have a group of 6 enemies with 175 health each at level 50. You probably wont find this, but let's go with it since that's your example. Let's say for some reason you haven't enhanced your attacks beyond accuracy. I will be listing first AoE attacks in descending strength, then cone attacks in decending strength, then single target attacks in descending strength. For Ice Blast Blizzard: Target Type: location based aoe Damage: 76 ticks of 2.78 lethal damage over 15 seconds, 76 ticks of 2.78 cold damage over 15 seconds, total damage of 422.56 damage over 15 seconds Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 2.42 Cast Time: 2.03 seconds Recharge Time: 2 minutes 50 seconds Ice Storm: Target Type: location based aoe Damage: 76 ticks of 0.78 lethal damage over 15 seconds, 76 ticks of 0.78 cold damage over 15 seconds, total of 118.56 damage over 15 seconds Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 1.88 Cast Time: 2.03 second Recharge Time: 1 minute Frost Breath: Target Type: 40 foot long 30 degree wide cone Damage: 2 ticks of 43.79 cold damage over 0.6 seconds, total damage of 87.58 damage over 0.6 seconds Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 4.69 Cast Time: 2.67 seconds Recharge Time: 16.seconds Bitter Freeze Ray: Target Type: single target Damage: 172.67 cold damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 9.87 Cast Time: 2.5 seconds Recharge Time 15 second Freeze Ray: Target Type: single target Damage: 11 ticks of 12.51 cold damage over 2 seconds, total of 137.61 damage over 2 seconds mag 3 hold for 9.54 seconds Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 12.51 Cast Time: 1 second Recharge Time: 10 seconds Ice Blast: Target Type: single target Damage: 40.04 smashing damage, 62.56 cold damage, total of 102.6 damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 10.61 Cast Time: 1.67 seconds Recharge Time: 8 seconds Ice Bolt: Target Type: single target Damage: 12.51 smashing damage, 50.05 cold damage, total of 62.56 damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 12.51 Cast Time: 1 seconds Recharge Time: 4 seconds Compare this to Dark blast. Again I'll list things in AoE (strongest to weakest), then cone (strongest to weakest), then single target (strongest to weakest). Blackstar Target Type: PBAoE Damage: 62.56 smashing damage, 187.68 negative energy damage, total of 250.24 damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 1.69 Cast Time: 3 seconds Recharge Time: 2 minutes 25 seconds Umbral Torrent Target Type: 80 ft long 30 degree wide cone Damage: 60.06 negative energy Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 3.75 Cast Time: 1.03 seconds Recharge Time: 15 seconds Tenebrous Tentacles Target Type: 40 foot long 40 degree wide cone Damage: 8.45 negative energy damage, 8 ticks of 6.26 negative energy damage over 7.1 seconds after a 1 second delay, total of 58.53 damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 5.01 Cast Time: 1.67 seconds Recharge Time: 10 seconds Gloom Target Type: single target Damage: 8 ticks of 13.76 negative energy damage over 3.6 seconds, total damage of 110.08 Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 11.39 Cast Time: 1.67 seconds Recharge Time: 8 seconds Life Drain Target Type: single target Damage: 102.6 negative energy damage, +120.48 self heal Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 10.33 Cast Time: 1.93 seconds Recharge Time: 8 seconds Abyssal Gaze Target Type: single target Damage: 3 ticks of 29.53 negative energy damage over 2.1 seconds, total of 88.59 damage, mag 3 hold for 9.54 seconds Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 4.09 Cast Time: 1.67 seconds Recharge Time: 20 seconds Dark Blast Target Type: single target Damage: 62.56 negative energy damage Average Damage Per Cast Cycle: 12.51 Cast Time: 1 seconds Recharge Time: 4 seconds You'll notice I didn't list any snipe attacks. There's a couple reasons for that. First of all, Ice Blast doesn't have a snipe. And second of all, you can't get any of the stats for Dark Blast's snipe in the character creation menu. But when you actually compare the numbers, you notice something rather interesting things. For one, while Ice Blast has higher damage many of those are DoT attacks. With the more damaging ones being location based DoT which the enemy will flee before they take the full damage unless you can prevent it. You should also take note that with the hypothetical group of enemies that all have 175 health, most finishing attacks are wasting damage regardless of if it was Dark or Ice Blast being used. And when you factor in cast times, yes TT is going to get it's full damage of on most of the enemy group, unless you follow it up with Blackstar. But why wouldn't you be leading off with Blackstar instead, and just wiping out the entire group all at once? Something which Ice Blast's tier 9 nuke can't always claim to do since enemies tend to flee the area as soon as it's cast. You also notice that the Damage Per Activation Cycle for both sets is roughly the same across the board. Imagine that, they both do the same overall damage due to Ice Blast having generally longer recharge times and activation times. Can we please put this "dark blast sacrifices damage for control" myth to bed now?

This, like many MMOs, doesn't really play well with controllers and joysticks. The problem is that there's not enough buttons on the controller and setting up modifier buttons on the controller is difficult in the extreme for CoH. This means that while you might need up to 30 buttons to control your character, you only have 14. Some classes will have an easier time then others. Scrappers for example just need to be able to map their main attacks and a target_next_alive bind. Everything else can be clicked once with a mouse if needed to toggle on or Ctrl-clicked to set to auto cast.

They trade damage per second in a game where high damage per second counts most. I'll leave it at that though. This is an argument that I do not think can be won when people like it just as is. Not everyone is going to like a powerset for the same reasons. I see potential in the set, and I se some work arounds, so it is not important to me to try and get the set changed. I understand why you guys like it, just as I am sure you understand why I don't like a couple of the powers. Nobody could change my mind about Practiced Brawler being left as is. Nobody could convince me to change it. Just as I know that no matter what I said, I could never get you to change your mind. ;) Like I said, a ton of people I talk to in game, random people every day, feel as though Dark Primary and Secondary for a Blaster is a joke. Not surprisingly, the people on the forums feel differently. I am in the middle on this, I love the set, but only see two abilities wrong with the set. So I see both sides. Except it doesn't trade DPS. The DPS for TT is on par with any other Blaster cone attack. What it trades is burst damage, which is not quite the same thing. And this trade is only made with one single attack. Lead off with TT, and you'll get the full damage on most of the enemies hit with it. Follow up with another cone attack (since enemies are still nicely grouped for it), and that too gets full damage on everything. And TT has likely now managed to deal most to all of it's damage to your primary target. Start using your single target attacks next. You might get less then full TT damage on one of the enemies caught in it, but then again with any other blaster set the 2nd or 3rd attack was probably overkill which 'wasted' damage as well. Or in other words you didn't trade any damage, but got a cone immobilize. The only thing you didn't get was a Single Big Number showing above everything's head when TT hit. Thus it likely feels like it does little damage. Then again the various 'rain' powers also show multiple ticks of low damage yet nobody complains about them trading damage for a secondary effect. In fact, it's entirely possible for an enemy to exit most Rain type attacks before they took the full damage from it. They can't do that with TT.

Once you get it, Oil Slick followed by Glue Arrow to keep enemies in it does a very good job of mitigating alpha strikes. Then if you can set the oil slick on fire, enemies don't last long enough to be an issue. It can sometimes be rough early on, but as long as the team isn't trying to do anything too crazy (like absolute max difficulty settings on an 8 man team) surviving isn't too difficult. And if you're worried about an alpha strike, a Luck or two will help with that.

As I'd already pointed out, dark blasters don't trade damage for controls to begin with. They might trade burst damage for a cone immobilize, But TT does damage on par with other Blaster cone attacks. It's not the highest damage blaster cone, but it's middle of the pack in terms of strength. And it does twice as much damage as the Defender version of TT. Corrupters do more damage at base, but with a blaster's inherent they'll get more damage overall out of it. In fact, none of Dark Blast (blaster version) sacrifices damage for utility. It gets both damage and utility. But even if that wasn't the case, blasters have long traded damage for utility. That's the whole point of one secondary after all.

I'm all about what is fair. How old are you? The fire DoT is the added utility that Fire Blast is suppose to bring to the table for a defender. Little hard or soft control (fireball might have a knockdown/back component) with extra damage to drop foes faster. A defender would get more benefit from the DoT then a blaster due to blasters dealing more burst damage.

This. I much prefer to see someone quote a specific thing which they are responding to. Much prefer it over the ones who quote someone who is quoting someone who is quoting someone.... In theory, we are reading the thread. There is no reason to quote half the thread in a post. Just highlight the main point you wish to discusss for clarity. I'll admit to occasionally participating in a quote pyramid. Especially if it's an amusing one. But in general I can agree with you.

Alright, so you did talk a lot about Defender using it. Any experience with it while playing say... a Ninja/TA MM? Even with defensive/healing sets, I know Ninja... die quite quickly. How well do you think it'd do as a solo MM secondary, especially when compared with other secondary sets? At least it sounds like Oil Slick could combo with certain pets easily. I've ran both a Ninja/Trick Arrow mastermind and a Thug/Trick Arrow mastermind to 50 in the past. Elite Bosses could be rough, but overall it was a pretty effective secondary for masterminds. I've also used Trick Arrow with a Nature controller to very good effect.

You recall incorrectly... or at least confusedly. The game can track higher numbers than whatever any given attribute is capped at, but the "hard cap" is whatever that cap is. Your statement would suggest that there are no "hard caps" at all, because the game will retain whether or not you're getting +400% or +4400% recharge but provide "no benefit beyond" the 400%. Defense is a "soft cap" because the game will calculate a tohit reduction of up to ~200 from the enemy's base, but then replace any result lower than 5 with 5. To my recollection, Resistance has an absolute hard cap of 200 or 300%, but after you hit your AT's limit there's no point in going for more beyond a having a buffer against resistance debuffs. Mind you, it's literally been years since it mattered. And outside of certain tanker builds it can be hard to impossible to hit the AT limits for resistance without outside buffs.

To-hit buff directly counters to-hit debuff. Let's take the exact same attack, it has a 75% base to-hit. It has a single SO worth of accuracy slotted. I'll show the formula and result for base chance to hit, with 15% to-hit debuff, with 15% to-hit buff, and with a combination of debuff and buff. No buff or debuff: (75+0)x1.33=99.75 (clamped to 95%) With debuff only: (75-15)x1.33=79.8 Both debuff & buff: (75+15-15)x1.33=99.75 (clamped to 95%) If you slotted for +50% acc and got hit by a 15% to-hit debuff it would be: (75-15)x1.5=90 As you can see, slotting more accuracy can counteract to-hit debuffs, but not as effectively as a to-hit buff. This is why Tactics or Targeting Drone can allow you to forego slotting accuracy.

Nope, not really. If anything it's gotten worse over time.

That's not quite true. The hard cap for resistance as I recall is far higher then 75%, 85%, or even 90%. But depending on your archtype you'll get no benefit beyond those values. 75% for most AT, 85% for kelds, and 90% for tankers and brutes.

Blasters were slated to get a version of Trick Arrow, but that never got finished before the server shutdown. As for the power set it's self, it's rather powerful. While it lacks any defensive buffs or healing ability, the debuffs more then make up for that. Due to a quirk of how the debuffs were coded, most of them ignore the 16 target cap. Poison Gas Arrow is a flat -35% damage debuff in the hands of a defender, I believe. Glue Arrow is a massive slow and -recharge debuff. And with good slotting both of them can be fired off just as the previous effect ends. Acid Arrow is a nice -def/-res debuff, although it's radius is smaller then you might like. There's a single target immobilize and single target hold. Flash Arrow is a nice to-hit debuff as well as debuffing enemy perception. Combine it with a partial stealth and you may as well be completely invisible. The sonic arrow is a really nice aoe -resistance debuff which again can affect more then 16 targets. And then there's Oil Slick. Oil Slick is... Well, it's incredibly powerful all on it's own. It's a slow that also constantly tries (and often succeeds) to apply knockdown. This alone would make it useful. But there's another aspect that pushes Oil Slick into top tier levels. It spawns an invisible target in the middle of the oil slick named (unimaginatively) Oil Slick. If this target gets hit by a fire attack the oil slick will burst into flames, doing some crazy high damage to every enemy caught within it. And remember, it for whatever reason ignores the 16 target cap. Energy attacks I think have a 75% chance to ignite the oil slick. People complain about it, and think the set is 'useless' mostly because the devs overbalanced it when bringing it to Live servers. On the test server there were teams of all TA/A defenders running around stacking the debuffs and generally trivializing everything. Even when solo you could self stack several of the key debuffs to the point that enemies were effectively statues who couldn't deal damage. And rather then flag the problem abilities (glue arrow and poison gas arrow) to not stack with other instances of that power, the devs at Cryptic decided to raise the recharge rates to 3 minutes while leaving the duration for the debuffs at 30 seconds. This meant that while Trick Arrow was still very effective, it could only be effective every few fights. With heavy slotting for recharge reduction you could get that down to a 30 second delay between the debuff wearing off and being able to recast it. The set was later re-balanced so that with 3 recharge redux enhancements (SO level of course) you could have Glue Arrow and Poison Gas Arrow finish recharging just as the debuff wore off. Maybe with a slight overlap. The problem is... After it initially got nerfed into the ground pre-launch few people were willing to give the set a second look. So many still think it's 'useless'. But I was having great luck with Trick Arrow even before the set had it's obscene recharge times lowered.

Yeah, thug bruiser does prefer melee... usually. Well, once he gets into melee range he prefers it. Until then however he prefers to just throw rocks most of the time. :) On the other hand, the arsonist is suicidal and keeps running into melee.

To my knowledge you can only have 5 copies of a set bonus. Note, that doesn't mean 5 instances of the same set. If five different sets all provide +3% ranged defense, you've hit the limit of how many +3% ranged defense set bonuses you can have. As for the soft caps, you can view your current Defense and Resistance values in your Combat Attributes panel. The defense soft cap is 45% regardless of what class you're playing. This is because enemies have a 50% chance to hit you if you've got no defense, and they always have at least a 5% chance to hit you. Conversely if you are being majorly defense debuffed, there is always a 5% chance an attack will miss you too. This works both ways, you always have a 5% chance to miss regardless of how much to-hit and accuracy you have. The defense hard cap I think is somewhere around 200%, but you're unlikely to reach it usually. By the same token, you'll find that any more then a total of -45% to-hit debuff is wasted most of the time for the same reason. The resistance soft cap depends on your AT. Brutes and Tankers have a soft cap of 90%, meaning if they are at the soft cap and get hit by an attack that would normally do 100 damage, they only take 10 damage. Peacebringers and Warshades have a resistance soft cap of 85. Everyone else has a resistance softcap of 75. For accuracy, keep in mind that to-hit is additive while accuracy is a multiplier. Most attacks as I recall have a base to-hit value of 75% and accuracy value of 1. What this means is that you'll hit the enemy 75% of the time, assuming they don't have any Defense or to-hit debuffs. A single at-level SO of accuracy makes the accuracy value of 1.33, or in other words your final chance to hit an even level minion is 75*1.33, or 99.75 which gets clamped to 95% chance to hit. To-hit buffs add to the base to-hit value, so a 75% base to-hit would be raised to 90% if you have a +15% to-hit buff. This makes the formula if you have a +15% to-hit buff and an at-level SO worth of accuracy slotted (75+15)*1.33 with any result higher then 95% being clamped down to 95%. If you regularly face +2 and +3 enemies, you may want more accuracy slotting, but if you typically face even level or +1 enemies a single SO worth of accuracy slotting is more then enough most times. Defense debuffs also reduce how much accuracy and to-hit you need to hit the 95% chance to hit limit. Recharge Reduction is capped at 400%, but this includes the base recharge value. So realistically you can get an additional +300% recharge reduction.

Can't remember off hand, but I want to say the Noxious Gas buff lasts for 30 seconds. The debuffs applied to enemies last for as long as they are within Nox Gas's effect radius. Meaning if they run out of the debuff radius, they stop being effected. Similarly if the henchman you buffed with Noxious Gas decides to engage in ranged combat instead of chasing down the next enemy to stay in melee they stop being debuffed. Which is why you may need to use the Go-To command to get your henchman into melee before ordering him to attack.

Of course, you can undock more then one tray. So if you need 30 macros for some reason, just undock 3 trays and reshape/rotate them to the desired configuration.

As an alternative, just hit the + symbol on your power tray, then right click the new tray. This will open up a menu allowing you to change the orientation and shape of the tray. Presto, you have a new tray for your macros! And you didn't have to monkey with adding files to the game folder.

Personally, I couldn't care less if people believe SCORE were going to open to the public or not after getting all their ducks in a row. What matters to me is that the Homecoming servers are here, and I can once again play this amazing game. And that's good enough for me.

THIS I soooo shoulda done this... There's also a 'Surgeon' in the Tiki room at Pocket D.

I think I remember being able to get the info for Nox Gas's effects from the debuff icon after it had been used on a henchman, don't quote me on this though. Other debuffs tend to directly target the enemy however, thus the Info will show you the exact amount. EDIT: Yeah, you can get the numbers after using it by right clicking the buff icon next to your henchman. Here's the numbers for it being used on a T3 henchman at level 50. 15.00%% strength to all damage on target Ignores buffs and enhancements -22.50%% resistance to all damage on target Ignores buffs and enhancements -15.00%% defense on target Ignores buffs and enhancements -7.50%% to hit on target Ignores buffs and enhancements It's not worth slotting anything except end redux and recharge into it. And you'll likely need to use Go-To in order to get the henchman into melee where Nox Gas is useful, but it's worth using for nasty fights.

Not quite anywhere. You can't use that slash command in a mission.

Does this make you the Nemesis Cop? Sorry, couldn't resist.

It's all a Nemesis plot. Everything is a Nemesis plot. Unless it's a Nemesis Pot or Nemesis Mop. Or when he's tired and it's a Nemesis Plop. Last time he made a movie, it was a Nemesis Flop.