aethereal

Very initial feedback on build 2 based on like literally 10 minutes of play: I like the stun being moved to barrage. Makes it easier for me to move to a secondary target, stun them, and then keep my big hitters on the main target I'm taking down. EDIT: Also if I crit on TF, I can lay down two guaranteed stuns in pretty rapid succession, which sometimes is what I want.

I mean, I'm not upset about the accolade power change, but I ran around and got the Atlas Park ones a couple days ago so that I could easily move my beta character back to getting P2W double XP, and it took me considerably more than 5 minutes.

LRTP is still available as an accolade power for picking up all the exploration badges in a zone.

I've been remiss in updating my feedback on my slow grind up levels. For those just joining us, this is an EM/Invul scrapper, I've been entirely solo, currently level 27. So I got TF at level 26. That's a big difference in the fun value of the set even right as you get it, just moving the number of big hitters in the set up from one to two. Honestly, I'd probably switch the positions of it and Whirling Hands. PC provides you with enough AoE (given its fast recharge) for the early 20's, and with TF carrying all of the mechanic of the set, I think it'd be nice to get it earlier. Not that the mechanic is a huge deal for me right now. Without Energy Transfer, there's no DPS add from EF, you either get a bigger area for PC (which I don't really need as I'm not yet facing large groups of foes), or guaranteed stun from BS, which is sometimes nice, but not really amazing, given the single-target nature of it and the plethora of stun options in Energy Melee. It helps my survivability when dealing with bosses, otherwise not a huge deal. If I were teaming, and thus facing larger spawns, I presume the bigger PC would be nice. That said, TF is still welcome with or without much help from the mechanic because, like Bone Smasher is great, but then you go for a long time before you get your next single-target tool, and having another big hit is super nice. With the new animation, it doesn't "feel" slow to me anymore. I mean, it's still a long animation, but it somehow gets under the threshold of feeling glacial. Speaking of survivability, mine still sucks. Almost certainly more to do with Invul than EM, but jesus. Not able to advance the difficulty above +1/x2 so far, and I have deaths from time to time. I'm not playing super conservatively or anything.

The underperformance of brute bio compared to scrapper bio may be a mitigating factor there.

I'm certainly not suggesting that we should be designing the game around track pad usage. I do want to push back, however, on this idea that you're getting enormous actual benefit from combat positioning with the mouse + macro + combat teleport option, rather than "it seems cool to teleport around the combat." Lining up cones is just not that hard, and in my experience is probably faster with normal movement than it is with combat teleport's animation time even if your precision is perfect with CT. My setup is clearly much less than ideal! But the only time I've found it to be a significant problem is in PvP (where tactical movement seems like a much bigger deal than PvE).

Do you mean Jaunt or Combat Teleport?

Yeah, I'm monitoring to-hit chance, but it appears to not, uh... work most of the time. I posted a bug about it in the bugs forum. For whatever reason, specifically the to-hit bonus from Combat Teleport does not seem to show up in the monitoring most of the time, and when it does, it's with a significant-enough lag that for a 5 second buff I'm unconvinced that I'm getting useful information.

There's no "primary target" to power crash. It's a cone, not a TAoE. Well, nevermind, obviously it could work on the actual person targeted. I guess new eagles class works that way?

So I've spent the last few hours of the game trying to see if I can grow to like Combat Teleport's to-hit effect or other tactical usage. I remain unconvinced. I've been spamming it in combat quite a bit to try to maintain the to-hit uptime, but goodness it's so short. Because of the frustrating way that the monitor doesn't usually show my to-hit bonus, I have to either keep my eyes glued to the tiny and ever-changing buff icons, or just guess when I'm needing it. It continues to not "feel" impactful in terms of gut-check "am I seeming to hit more often" (even though I enhanced it with an attuned Gaussian's To-Hit buff). I've been facing opponents with to-hit debuffs (flash grenades from Rogue PPD), and even stacking Combat Teleport's buff doesn't seem to win out against their debuff. The same enemies also have a patch effect, but I usually find it more advantageous to stay in it and cluster my enemies up for AoEs than escape it with Combat Teleport. I almost invariably find keyboard movement more precise to line up my cone attack (though I might again find it different with a mouse). It continues to be a great travel power (with Ninja Run), to the point where I am uninterested in getting actual Teleport. I don't know. I more-or-less like the power, but I can't help but feel that it's not great at what's supposed to be its core role. I'm going to try messing with my binds a little and see if I can find a more productive use for it.

Here's a very speculative suggestion: Increase the percentage chance of stuns for Energy Punch, Barrage, Power Crash, and Whirling Hands, decrease the duration of the stuns. Why: I'm feeling weirdly squishy as I do my lowbie explorations of this set. I've been running Roy Cooling, which has as its opponents rogue PPD and Sky Raiders. These guys are shooting a lot of guns at me, and I'm a EM/Invul scrapper, this feels like it should be a good matchup. I have 47% S/L resistance and 11% or so S/L defense. But, at +1/x2, I'm ending a lot of fights at about 10% health. I recently ran a Kat/Invul scrapper through these same levels, and it felt considerably safer in these kinds of matchups. So, I asked myself, why am I feeling so squishy? My tentative conclusion is that it's variance in the mitigation of Energy Melee, which of course is mostly in the form of stuns. All early powers in EM besides Bone Smasher have a fairly low chance to stun. Here are the numbers from my detailed info screen: Energy Punch: 30% chance, 2 mag, 4.88s duration Barrage: 10% chance, 2 mag, 5.86s duration Bone Smasher: 60% chance, 3 mag, 7.81s duration Power Crash: 20% chance, 3 mag, 4.88s duration Whirling Hands: 30% chance, 2 mag, 4.88s duration What happens is you get a kind of on-and-off cycle of mitigation. If you get lucky with your stuns (many members of the spawn stunned by the first 2-3 attacks), then a given spawn is VERY safe, hardly touching your health, as you kill most members of the spawn before their stuns wear off, or they get only one or two attacks. On the other hand, in the more likely case where your first few attacks stun few or no opponents, you get almost no mitigation. I think it would be better if stuns (besides Bone Smasher) were more reliable but less long-lasting, making it less likely that you'd get very little mitigation and less likely that you'd get a ton of mitigation, more somewhere in the middle. I'm thinking like take the chances up about 20% for EP, Barrage, PC, and WH, and knock a second or so off the duration.

For all characters, I set up power tray 9 as a vertical bar on the left-hand side of my screen and fill it with my toggles. Typically, sprint on top, a travel power under it, and then armor and utility toggles. See attached picture. On live, it is consistently the case that when I log in, the top power (sprint) does not respond to clicks. I have to click some other power on that bar, at which point the top power becomes clickable. On beta just now, I found that the top two powers were not clickable when I logged in (so sprint and ninja run in this case). I clicked one of my armor toggles off and back on again, at which point sprint and ninja run became clickable. This is regardless of the state of the powers -- they just don't respond to clicks on the power icon, it's not like "sprint is turned off." If it's on, it doesn't turn off. If it's off, it doesn't turn on. On live, this never affects the second power, only the top one, so it was mildly concerning to see the problem, uh, grow or whatever on beta. I use the 64 bit Mac client.

Lowbie explorations update (this is with my EM/Invul scrapper): I did the Graham Easton arc, with difficulty increased to +1/x2. This is with some powers slotted with ATOs and other sets, other powers unslotted or slotted with trash that happened to drop. This is how I play on HC live, more or less, so I'm aiming for verisimilitude here. The arc brought me from 18->20. Got a little more experience with having the new, improved Whirling Hands as well as PC. AoE feels Just Fine on EM to me. I mean, certainly not top-tier, but I've got solidly hitting AoEs that do respectable damage, check. You will be shocked to hear that +1/x2 is significantly more difficult than +0/x1! This manifested mainly in terms of my endurance problems resuming with a vengeance, as I had to cycle through more powers for each spawn, and used my end-hungry AoEs more. The final battle of that arc (four one-on-one combats against Lts then one against a Boss) was predictably a breeze with Energy Melee. I sometimes have problems with that just in terms of attrition, ending up starting the fight with the boss at low enough health and/or endurance that it's a bit of a problem (never really bad, just sometimes I pop more insps than I'd like). This time, I didn't come within a mile of touching an insp. The stuns really prevented any of the lts from touching my health, and when the boss came along I popped build-up and killed him in a rotation-and-a-half. I then cheated up to 22 and will be looking to see how much I can push difficulty up through the 20's.

GUYS. GUYS. YOU CAN FOLLOW TSOO SORCERERS. I was fighting a Tsoo Sorcerer who, annoyingly, teleported away through a wall, as they do. I had him targeted and I had a bind to combat teleport to targets and I suddenly remembered a comment about powexeclocation no longer needing line of sight, so I tapped 0 and appeared right next to the little jerk and killed him. This is amazing. It's better than sex. I take back all of the bad things I said about combat teleport. (I mean, I don't, really. Teleporting enemies are pretty rare. But this is a pretty amazing QOL benefit for dealing with an annoying situation in game, and feels cool and thematic and awesome.)

Scrapper.

Continuing Lowbie Explorations: I finished up the Skulls arc, which took me to level 14, cheated up to level 16, then just did the Laura Lockhart Arc which took me to 18. Veles gave me trouble at the end of the Skulls -- he killed me twice. I think this was more due to it being not a great match-up for invul than anything about energy melee, but EM didn't close the gap for me (this was as an EB -- I've been at default difficulty so far). I did the beginning of the Lockhart arc without any problems besides annoyingly long breaks to recoup endurance, leveled to 17 and put a Perf Shifter attuned endmod and the proc into stamina. This didn't make my endurance problems completely go away, but moved it from "really frustrating" to "mildly annoying." I did the big mass of underlings thing at the end of the penultimate Lockhart mission with just PC, and really did surprisingly well! Ate a couple of blues, had a somewhat hard time with endurance through the sustain, but I was successful and not really in danger. The final EB was actually more difficult than the masses of underlings. Lion-o or whatever his name is wasn't any trouble either. Comments: I had somehow confused myself into thinking that PC was a melee targeted AoE instead of a cone. This is probably mostly just because I confused it with ToF in Dark Melee, but I note that the power effect with the big expanding energy circle makes it look a lot more like a targeted AoE than a cone. My AoE rotation, now that I have whirling hands, feels somehow in better shape than my single-target rotation? Even with a bit of global recharge, a little local in both EP and Barrage, and a lot of local recharge in BS, I still have a loooong gaps in my ST. Because of this, misses are a big deal. If I miss with Barrage or, god forbid, Bone Smasher, it's a little grim. With the final mission, I definitely started to feel like I need to turn up the difficulty. Probably could've a little earlier. Certainly could've if I gave myself a full IO build, but I'm intentionally leaving some gaps here.

powexeclocation camera:max combat teleport is what I use. Jumps you to the place where your camera is currently pointed. But people with mouse buttons to spare may find that they want to do: powexecname combat teleport With a mouse button, which will not actually execute the entire jump, it will bring up the targeting reticule on the mouse, and then you can click the mouse button to execute the teleport. So it's like maybe thumb-mouse-button, look at the reticule, possibly adjust, left-click, teleport. (I also use powexeclocation target combat teleport for bringing me to a target, of course.) ((You may also find it useful to make a macro to teleport straight up while traveling, which I believe would be powexeclocation up:max combat teleport, but you might have to actually specify like powexeclocation up:100 combat teleport? Not sure, haven't used it. That may be particularly useful if you want to multi-port, first port brings you up in the air for better line of sight, then immediately follow up with a horizontal movement port.))

I was not. And, look, I'm sure this is solvable. But on HC live, I don't usually have to. I can just get to 17 and put Performance Shifters into stamina, and start accumulating set bonuses and whatever. Like, yes, there may be a bit of a rough patch right before I hit 17, but nothing unmanageable. Energy Melee seems worse at lowbie endurance economy than other melee sets.

I do! I enjoy Combat Teleport. I think a lot of people will. That's something I explicitly called out. It's a fun power. I just don't think it's a very good one. And yes, I may not be able to take as full advantage of its tactical movement opportunities as people with a different input setup can. But honestly, tactical movement just isn't that important in CoH PvE. Most enemies do not have patch powers. You can get CJ instead and have just as much ability to move around, with a more fluid control setup, and get defense as well. There are a few cases where CT will enable you to do things that CJ would not -- like get out of caltrops fast -- but there are other cases where just tapping jump will be faster and easier, or where it's hard to place the reticle of CT because of an intervening obstacle, or where you screw up and teleport somewhere you don't want to be. In terms of movement powers, it's a wash. For blasting characters, in every place that doesn't have low ceilings, almost certainly Hover outperforms both CJ and CT in terms of actually getting a benefit from tactical movement. Huge benefits there that CT and CJ won't be able to match. Now, I think CT is cooler than Hover. I probably under-pick Hover because the kind of pokey feeling of it isn't great for me. But being able to reliably deny your enemies melee attacks is big. I really want to call out the idea that if we make a power that people like for thematic/fun reasons, but it underperforms mechanically, that's in a lot of ways worse than making a power that's not compelling either mechanically or thematically. The "bad both mechanically and thematically" power is just a waste of space, but it doesn't really hurt anyone. The "bad mechanically but good thematically power" gets picked and creates a frustrating situation for players where their attempts to build a unified conceptual hero/villain feel punished compared to the guy who just picked all the good powers. Not that this one power will move the needle a lot in terms of thematic-versus-effective, but it's part of the death of a thousand cuts of CoH right now.

Okay, here's my feedback on Combat Teleport after a couple hours of playing with it on a lowbie EM/Invul scrapper. Combat Teleport feels good. That's no surprise, I think that it was clear from Burst of Speed and Jaunt that people were hungry for a fast, fluid teleportation power, and Combat Teleport provides that. My experience is that you do not run out of charges unless you try really hard to, which is good, and was the major problem with Burst of Speed. Jaunt of course required you to have Speed of Sound on, which had its own downsides. Combat Teleport also provides you with an unequivocally teleport-y looking power activation, which is nice for some concepts. But is Combat Teleport good? I'm going to say... not really. If you had a choice between Combat Jumping and Combat Teleport on pure utilitarian grounds, I think CJ is the clear winner. In terms of movement utility, they're different but I would certainly hesitate to say that CT is better, just given how un-fluid teleportation is in this game (I use a trackpad on a laptop, it is possible that a multi-button mouse would change my mind here). In terms of the buff, the continuous defense of CJ is just clearly better than the inconsistent to-hit of CT. And of course CJ is a great slot-mule for LotG global recharge, there is no equivalently useful slotting for CT. In terms of Hover, the slotting/buff is the same, and Hover is almost certainly more movement-power useful for blast sets than CT. EDIT to add: Probably there are some clever movement things that CT enables that Hover and CJ do not. But tactical movement isn't super important in PvE in this game. Getting a bit more defense is going to be vastly more important than a clever movement trick for 99% of PvE play. I expect that CT may have a PvP niche, but I don't PvP enough to say. I've been trying to proactively use the CT for the to-hit buff. In terms of feeling -- I don't notice it. I mean, I'm sure it is giving me the to-hit buff, but it doesn't feel noticeable. I'm not like, "Oh wow, I'm hitting a lot more." And this is with a not-very-well-slotted lowbie, probably the place we'd expect to see some noticeable improvement from a to-hit buff. What about theory-wise? I think it's really hard to use the to-hit buff from CT in a disciplined way. Here's my thinking: 1. We generally are going to be building for capped or near-capped to-hit rolls[1]. I'm not just talking about optimized end-game builds here, this is advice for slotting that goes back to the SO-only days. Maybe more casual players don't build for enough accuracy to cap to-hit rolls against +4s, but then they don't tend to play against +4s. In general, people don't like missing, and if you just drop CT into a pretty standardly-slotted build, it's unlikely that the inconsistent +10% to hit is going to help much. 2. Okay, so fine, maybe we can change slotting to take advantage of CT. Okay, but how? Are we really going to drop our accuracy slotting in order to take advantage of the to-hit from CT? That feels... not great. The buff from CT is short-lived and it takes a lot of attention and button pressing to keep it up. Are we going to deal with our to-hit rolls dropping very significantly without managing the uptime of the CT buff? I don't want to do that. I don't think many people do. 3. Well, is there an advanced strategy here? I can think of a couple. You could use CT with Follow Up in claws and similar powers. Follow Up gives a potentially stacking, large to-hit buff once it gets going, so you can underslot accuracy in your attacks and use Follow Up to paper over that. Then the issue is what if Follow Up missses? Well, you could kind of kick off the virtuous cycle by doing CT->Follow Up->your actual attacks. Okay, that's great and all, but what are we really getting there? We can just slot Follow Up itself for accuracy and get the same benefit, right? Here, CT isn't saving us broad accuracy slotting across all of our attacks, but accuracy slotting for a single power. Not amazing. I guess we can just use CT to paper over the inescapable miss chance for Follow Up. If you get a miss on Follow Up, just hit CT and then go ahead with your attacks as normal until the next time FU comes up. That sounds... fine? A bit niche. The other thing I can think of is that you could use CT with a heavy defense-debuffing set like say Rad Blast. Use CT to make your first couple of attacks hit, and then you don't need to worry about uptime of the CT attacks because your stacking defense debuffs have made it so that you're gonna hit regardless. Honestly, this sounds to me like it'd only work on Rad Blast, but maybe it would work okay on some of the weapon sets. So then you can underslot those attacks for accuracy and, probably what you're going to do is proc them out, right? Like, this sounds like a tactic that's way too sophisticated and complex for someone to do with common IOs or SOs, and if you're using sets, you basically get plenty of accuracy from the sets, so this sounds like a tactic for proccing. I'm a little dubious that this ultimately works out -- after all, you can already use Tactics, Aim, Build Up, Kismet, potentially Bio Armor or Invul, and others to get global to-hit bonuses, and we aren't hearing about procced out Rad Blast as a monster. But maybe someone can make it work. It sounds niche to me. So my belief is that CT feels good but is mechanically disadvantageous. I think people will take it for concept reasons even if it's not great. Some people are going to say, "Great, mission accomplished, the power will be reasonably popular," but my opinion is this is actually the worst case. Powers that people really want to take, but are bad, are worse than powers that are bad and people don't want to take. People shouldn't be mechanically punished for wanting a thematic, cool-seeming power, and the game shouldn't be mechanically incentivizing hodge-podge collections of unthematic power picks. What could be done? The easy thing to do is give CT a Combat-Jumping-Equivalent defense buff, non-stacking with itself, lasting I don't know, 15-30 seconds. Yes, yes, I know, it's boring and also we may all feel a bit dubious about putting in yet another pool defense power. But look, people can already get all the pool defense powers they might possibly want. You can take weave, combat jumping, hover, maneuvers, and stealth, that's more than the number of power pool picks you get guys. And you can also get invisibility and afterburner. We aren't going to see any power creep here -- CT will substitute for one of the other 1st tier power pool defense picks that already exist. It'll be a QOL benefit for people who want teleport for thematic reasons and now are also picking up CJ or Stealth or whatever when they don't really want them, in order to pick up LotG slots and stack defense. If we feel really strongly that we shouldn't do that, I see a couple of options. 1. Let the to-hit buff last a lot longer, so that you can viably improve its uptime and use it to decrease your overall need for accuracy slotting with a broad variety of sets. 2. Keep the buff short but make it bigger or let it stack, so that you can use CT to break through enemies which floor your to-hit chance, such as enemies with dark attacks that give you big to-hit debuffs (CoT ghosts, Shadows, etc), or ones that have high defense (Paragon Protectors etc). Neither of those cases are very much of the game, but they're annoying as hell, and if CT lets you counter them, that's SOMETHING. [1] There's a thorny terminology issue here. What I mean is not that we max the to-hit stat, but rather we max the actual chance to hit, once to-hit, accuracy, defense, and purple patch are all considered together. I'm calling that the "to-hit roll," since as far as I know there's no official term for this.

I monitored to-hit bonus so I could understand my combat teleport better, and I find that it never shows the to-hit from combat teleport. I believe I'm actually getting the to-hit bonus, to be clear -- I see the buff in the buff bar, and when I actually open the full combat stats window, I can see the bonus to to-hit. But the monitor either never shows it or very rarely.

Yeah, like I said, I'm not sure how much we even care about how travel powers work when you can do so much with temp powers. But I thought I'd bring the topic up.

Okay, second piece of feedback: Combat Teleport + Ninja Run is a hell of a movement power. Maybe a better movement power than Speed of Sound? In my opinion, the downside of Ninja Run as a movement power isn't that it's too slow in straight-line running, it's that its jump height/distance isn't quite enough to handle some of the bigger walls. For example, getting up to the "lip" around Steel Canyon can be challenging for Ninja Run, and getting into the central citadel area of Cap Au Diable necessarily involves running around to one of the ramps (while fly and teleport obviously don't have these problems, and Super Jump at least eventually gets to the point of clearing them). This is obviously the problem with Super Speed, and Speed of Sound sort of patches SS with Jaunt mainly for vertical ability, right? But Ninja Run + Teleport gives you the ability to jump a fair amount, and then at the height of your jump combat teleport for another 100 feet of either horizontal or vertical distance, and the come out of the teleport with Ninja Run's pretty darn good jump control to stick the landing (or teleport again). I've been finding that significantly more user friendly than Speed of Sound + Jaunt, and if you do screw it up, Combat Teleport will be up again faster than Jaunt will to retry it. Plus for more minor obstacles, you can jump rather than try to teleport around it. I don't know if we're even bothering to balance around travel powers anymore. But if we care, my initial impression is that Combat Teleport makes it at least as easy to skip a travel power in conjunction with Ninja Run as does Sentinel/Scrapper Shinobi + Ninja Run.

I'm a bit behind Safehouse in my lowbie explorations, but am also playing an EM/Invul scrapper and I second most of his observations. I found myself starting to gasp for endurance at level 10, running only one toggle (temp invul). It's not unusual for melees to have endurance problems at low levels, but I'm having particularly large ones. I noticed this also on an EM/WP Brute I had HC live. I cheated myself the ATOs at level 10 and slotted most of each set in Bone Smasher and PC, and kind of expected that to make it go away, but while it helped, I still often have to rest for endurance after every second or third spawn. This feels like a temporary problem that will go away as I level and invest in sets, but it's pretty noticeable at this level. Maybe reduce the end cost of either EP or Barrage a smidge to help lowbies out? Shouldn't affect high-end performance much. I've done okay against the Skull bosses (Mandible, Maxilla, Chernobog, and Morana so far), but they do hit you hard, and I've had to eat some insps to survive them. I've really been digging PC as a levelling tool. Yes, it's not an amazing AoE, but it's fairly easy to use (easier to hit a couple or three mobs than with a cone), and it's up a lot, so it's forgiving. While this part of the game goes fast, it is a little brutal to have the signature mechanic of the set be completely locked out until your T8 power pick.

I just started playing with combat teleport. My initial feedback is: I'd like it if there was a different animation option that was a little more dynamic. Both burst of speed and jaunt have way more action-looking poses than the sort of lean back and flex teleport animation (edit: sorry, it's not the lean-back-and-flex, it's the lean-forward-palms-down one. Whichever. Same critique), and for a rapid in-combat teleport, it looks a little stiff and, well, not like a good combat pose. Like, that's not how Nightcrawler looks when he bamfs.