aethereal

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.

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.