aethereal

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.

You can not activate two powers with one keypress (binds or macros). You won't be able to make a bind or macro that both combat teleports and attacks.

This seems to not be true anymore? They didn't put it in the patch notes, but on beta its damage seems comparable with other "whirling"-style PBAoEs. For a level 50 brute, through in-game detailed descriptions: Whirling Axe: 41.71 damage Whirling Sword: 41.71 damage Typhoon's Edge: 47.54 damage Whirling Hands: 49.29 damage

I've just run levels 1-8, solo, on an EM/Invul scrapper. I won't belabor the feedback because nothing terribly exciting came up. It feels solid, bone smasher hits hard, nothing too crazy so far (besides whatever happened that caused me to incorrectly believe that bone smasher wasn't proccing its stun).

You're correct! Sorry for the confusion, it's edited.

IGNORE THIS I'm using Scrapper Energy Melee as a lowbie. I do NOT have Total Focus yet and so no guaranteed stun. Bonesmasher is suspposed to have a 60% chance to stun (per the detailed info) when not used with Energy Focus. I noticed it didn't seem that reliable, so I started watching. In my last several fights, I've used Bone Smasher at least 10 times, against minions and lts (both should be stunned by one application, it's mag 3), and have not seen it proc its stun so far. This seems wildly unlikely if it's just RNG bullshit, so I'm posting here. EDIT: Update: I have combat log turned on, and I did just stun someone with my bone smasher, so it's not 0% rate. So far, it still seems massively under 60%, though I suppose RNG shenanigans are possisble. EDIT2: Do Arachnos have some stun resistance? I once again got the "you stunned Arachnos Kidnapper with your bone smasher," in the combat log, but he wasn't actually stunned. He's an lt, so rank shouldn't do it. EDIT3: Okay, nevermind, sorry for the report. I think it was some combination of attacking a mix of enemies who have some higher-mag stun protection and getting mildly unlucky with stuns on other enemies in the mix. Now that I'm fighting different enemies and watching the log, I see about the correct proc rate for the stun.

Crit mechanics are as follows: Scrappers have a base chance to crit of 5% against minions, 10% against lts and up. We'll ignore minions now, since you don't really need crits to quickly kill minions. One of the scrapper ATOs increases this crit rate (on lts and up) to 14% with the non-superior version or 16% with the superior version. The other ATO gives a crit rate of 50% (it says +50%, but I think it's just a flat 50%, not 50% + 10%/14%/16%) for a short time (5 seconds, I think?) with a PPM of 2 (non-superior) or 3 (superior). Stalkers have a base chance to crit of 7%, and it increases for every additional person on your team -- I forget how much, but I believe it ends up a bit north of 30% on an 8 person team. (Most) Single-target attacks have a 100% chance to crit out of hide and (most) AoE attacks have a 50% chance to crit out of hide. The stalker chance-to-hide ATO has 4 (non-superior)/5 (superior) PPM. So much each AT crits depends a lot on a bunch of things. If a scrapper can find a really good attack to get its critical strikes proc in and abuse global recharge, they might reasonably see 6 activations per minute, so that's like 50% uptime. But another scrapper might get a lot less. A stalker on an 8 person team gets an enormous crit rate.

No +to-hit at +5, and thus no +to-hit at +5/+6 but most people are level-shifted.

That's probably why I said, " But then, there are characters who really thematically work without travel powers," yes. You can cap speed with the temp powers. You can't put a LotG in any travel power, and you can put a KB protection in every travel power. Travel powers are pretty low down the list of major imbalances in CoH! But it's still a bit of a bummer that you might very much want a travel power for theme but the power serves no real purpose in terms of utility.

I know. I didn't like it then, either.

Cyclops. Iron Fist. I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other examples. The travel power thing is complicated. On the one hand, I don't really like that there is optimization pressure to skip travel powers in the game. A lot of these powers are very core thematic elements to the characters: Superman isn't Superman if he can't fly[1]. Nightcrawler isn't Nightcrawler if he can't teleport. We don't have a really good equivalent of Spider-Man's webslinging, but the kind of urban mobility at least vaguely represented by superjump is central to a lot of characters as well. And of course superspeed is completely defining to a LOT of characters. On some level, I guess I'd like it if we all got one slot that had to be used for a travel power, so that people couldn't sacrifice it for a bit more defense or whatever. But then, there are characters who really thematically work without travel powers, or who would genuinely like more than one. Probably the amount of change made to really make them "work" would be vast compared to the reward. [1] Yes, I know he couldn't fly very early in his character history. He wasn't Superman as we think of the character, then.

Yeah, it was compared to a "mini-nuke" like lightning rod or shield charge, but they just meant that in terms of AoE damage, not the teleport effect. That change was rolled out, tested, and deemed too strong. When they tried to significantly weaken it, people kept referring to the original "mini-nuke" damage and -- putting together some things Jimmy said -- I think they felt like they couldn't get useful feedback on it, because people just kept saying, "This isn't Lightning Rod." This seems to have contributed in part to the decision not to publicly test Page 6 so far, and only invite trusted testers to the closed beta, with public beta pushed way back to the part where they're doing final passes for bugs and perhaps fine tuning numbers, not exploring concepts.

In terms of the mitigation, rather than the offense boost, you have to understand that Bio lives and dies by its clicks. Ablative Carapace gives you both a chunky absorb shield and a big regen boost. So while people are working their way through your absorb, you're healing up your actual hit points. DNA Siphon gives you a big heal (in a crowd) and a big regen boost (if there are DEAD targets to hit). And Parasitic Aura also gives absorb and regen. You simply won't have the same defense/resist numbers that an equivalently slotted other set will give you, and you have to use these powers, and use them well. You'll want to get the recharge of all of them down to the point where you continuously have your regen boosted, and you need to think about when to activate each one. It's pretty easy to get Ablative Carapace and DNA Siphon into an "every spawn" cadence, while Parasitic Aura is on a longer recharge cycle. DNA Siphon has big swings in what it does based on the number of alive and dead targets it has. If all your clickies are on cooldown, you will absolutely be more fragile than other sets. And regen is really important for bio armor -- I keep it monitered so I can see if it's debuffed, because the way this set works is it gives you relatively little passive resist/defense, good regen (if you're metering out your clickies) and then absorb shields to let the regen do its work. If your regen is floored, you will die as soon as your absorbs get eaten through, which they will fairly fast. Like other regen-based sets -- and I think that bio is best understood as a regen-based set with a sideline of defense/resist -- bio rewards max hitpoint super hard. Plan to do the accolades for this one. Slot your max hp stuff aggressively. In general, I find the defensive side of Bio to be a bit black and white. One mission, you're a god, just tearing through your enemies. Next enemy group hits one of your holes, and it's all you can do to stay alive.

In fairness, elec/kin gets enough -recovery that they can in fact lock down opponents via sapping. Not utterly completely, but you can get good extensive mitigation through sapping. However, you still take alpha, and it's not fast enough for teaming. I played an elec/kin on live, but the world was very different then.

I believe that Spines does too.

Guys, nobody is reading your current-max-length bios.

I had savage leap, it's great, but it didn't save the combo for me.

I ran a Sav/WP to the late 30s, and just ended up finding it boring. With no clicks in the secondary and savage's light combo system seeming like something i should mostly ignore, it was just click the same three powers over and over again. Felt reasonably strong, just not engaging.

I know this post is a month old, but resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch (AVs have no special resistance to resist debuffs because resist debuff resistance is just resistance -- for AVs to have special resist debuff resistance they'd have to have high resistances. But purple patch is different and does affect resist debuffs).

I don't want to tune the game back down to the point where most people need to solo at +0/x1, no bosses. That's a just fundamentally less interesting solo experience than we have today. And reasonably powerful superheroes should absolutely be able to jump into a crowd of bad guys and finish them off. But I wouldn't mind if the a typical forum-build could manage +1/x4 or +1/x5, with the very toughest soloers were struggling to do +2/x6 or so, with +4/x8 laughably out of reach for any single player.

Making a full-on, "you may not pass this encounter unless you mez this person" is probably not a great mechanic for general play across lots of spawns. But you can I think pretty validly add softer but significant rewards to the table for mezzes. Give an enemy a toggle that gives them +30% or +50% resist-all, suppressed by mez. Give them an aura that gives +30% or +50% to damage to all their allies, suppressed by mez.

How's this for a problem statement: "For controllers and dominators to be useful with their control-set powers, there need to be enemies which are fundamentally more vulnerable to controls than they are to damage, and such enemies are very rare in CoH."

Uptime and "what power you click most" seem like they're over-prioritized by people in this thread. You can be a key contributor to a team by having a suite of three powerful powers that you use one of on every other spawn. Like, that's at least theoretically the case. We can imagine a world in which a dominator spends most of his actual playtime using assault-set powers, but every other spawn or so fundamentally changes the dynamic with a long-cooldown power that neuters some major threat or rescues the team, and that that is a worthwhile character even if the majority of his button-clicking is doing DPS and that DPS is much worse than a blaster. And similarly, we can imagine a troller who mostly heals or buffs or debuffs, and his heals, buffs, or debuffs are worse than a defender's, but again, he has these rescue power that get broken out only once ever few spawns but they are still super useful. Now, I think it is the case that the current meta, or at least what people see of the current meta, is: a. A world in which you don't need rescues, not every spawn, not every other spawn, not even once every two or three missions, because what happens is the team deletes every spawn in a few seconds. This is probably most true in things like PI radio missions or a few very commonly played, very well-understood TFs, but there's an undeniable element of it happening across the game, at least in high-level 8-perosn teams. b. The kinds of things which aren't just easily-deleted-spawns, which do provide some kind of threat that might need a rescue, are not necessarily well-handled by control sets. The escalating ability to simply ignore controls brought on by rank in CoH is not super-well tuned to a reality in which the team has a LOT of ability to instantly kill minions. c. The all-or-nothing aspects of control makes it very hard to thread the needle between "My supposedly powerful control does literally nothing" and "I can city-of-statues the entire game." But the solution to these problems is not, it seems to me, to throw up your hands and say, "A dominator is just a blaster with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its damage up to blaster levels," and "a controller is just a defender with a useless primary powerset, you should bring its buffs/debuffs/heals up to defender levels."