kikyoku

I love playing support (controllers /defenders) but I get bored of them often because they depend on teams so much. Both of my favorites here and on live were stalkers, katana/nin on live and psy/dark on Everlasting. The feeling of independence is amazing, I can stealth to the important parts, and take my time setting up the fight. Or I can go nuts and bulldoze through the mission. The methodical, single target fighting is like a rhythm game, and stalkers always surprise me with how durable they are. Plus, every good stalker is Too Cool For School. They have cool edgy names like Crisis Limit or mysterious ones like Day Dream. My inner edgelord teenager is alive and well.

Wow right on the page huh thanks

I can't find any reference for support values between archetypes, does something like that exist, or do I need to go researching? Talking about things like defense bonus from FF between defenders, corruptors, controllers, and masterminds. Or Heal Other base hp gain. Would also be nice to see secondary effects, like the -accuracy on dark blast. I doubt there's anything as simple as damage scales, but that would be perfect.

I had never really played tankers before and decided to try it out. Around level 15 I just started herding unconsciously, I would aggro a group of enemies and then break line of sight, forcing them to bunch up. I had always thought this was a specific tactic employed by skilled tanks, but now I just realize it's the most efficient strategy because individual enemies aren't a threat and you want to optimize your aoe damage as much as possible. Has anyone experienced this with other ATs, where a new perspective completely changes how you view gameplay?

I think the biggest change is just the leveling curve. I don't want to turn this into a complaints post, but everyone just powers to 50 on double xp, and the only things being run below that are task forces. Hollows used to be what you did at low levels every time, and the danger of it was the point. Now A Hollows group is pretty rare and they are always just running arcs. Plus, travel powers and fast travel means you don't have your blaster sprinting through the mission door in the red with a group of trolls following them. A couple times now I've powered a new character to 20 to experience low level content and no one was doing it. I know I could just run it myself but... I guess I just miss the crowd of people. I almost wonder if we shouldn't reduce the number of shards and have everyone play together.

Street cleaning - radio basically eliminated this, but several HC changes and a smaller player base put the nail in the coffin. Teams used to just run around and beat up mobs on the street. That's basically what Boomtown was for. I also used to follow solo players around and heal them, was my favorite hobby.

OK, not to necro but I've been playing with the temporal armor set a lot in my head, and I figured this was better than a new thread. I like the gist of what's been said here, where temporal is high defense with heals, kind of like SR/Ninjitsu. But we have those already, so let's get weird. Blah blah see the future and dodge attacks. But you can't just heal for free, it has to come from somewhere: Really high power abilities with consequences. A toggle that boosts recharge and regen, but drains end as you concentrate on controlling time. An activated ability that resets your recharges, but then hits you with -Recharge as time unscrunches itself. A heal + absorb that cuts regen. Inversely, a recovery boost that drains end after a bit. A toggle that boosts recharge the more enemies around you, as you slow them and steal their time. A buff that makes all attacks crit for a few seconds, and then blocks crits for a while, as you moved those attacks backwards in time. Temporary self rez buf, as a version of you from the future switches places all buffed out, and then goes back, leaving you barely conscious. This kind of concept would build a really unique and interesting play style, where you're trying to shift around your strengths in a fight to make yourself best at what's needed when needed. Addendum : Time Doppelganger. A static pet with a taunt aura pops in, deals some trivial damage, and disappears after a few seconds.

Is it possible to reach effective invisibility (stealth 54') without any powers granting the bonus? I know you can get 30' from the travel IOs, but can you get the other 24'? I know stealth is a one-off now, and Super Speed can get you there, but I just didn't know if there might be temp powers or some other effect that could fill in the gap.

Bill is right, dps depends entirely on how you build. That said, https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Damage#Damage_Scale And https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Limits#Maximum_4 Take this with a grain of salt. Brutes are low scalar because their inherent gives them a damage bonus, which is why they have a high boost limit. Same with scrappers /stalkers and criticals. The damage scales just give you a base of comparison to know where to go, there are dozens of options to boost DPS, directly or indirectly. Pets for instance are extremely difficult to calculate hypothetically, as their damage output is dependant on how you use them. Defenders, a classic support archetype, can have high DPS and survivability thanks to their buffs /debuffs in concert with pool powers and IO sets. Or not, DPS is just one tool. The only real test is to play the build a while and get a sense of what's working and what isn't.

OK so late to the party but here's my take : Stun is so-so but can be useful to make alpha suck less. I slot with stupefy, which not only gives me that sweet ranged defense (don't @ me) but also adds kb. The bonus to duration means that anything you stun is out for the fight. The kb is reasonably effective in my experience, and can scoot a mob back, while also mitigating damage. This can save you if overwhelmed (or your overly zealous stalker teammate). It's situational for sure, but it's useful in a clutch. Plus the kb added pretty much makes torrent redundant (unless you want a third cone attack for some reason). As for your question, this set has so much -tohit that it would be redundant. I start almost every fight with blackstar, which basically floors tohit anyway. If you really want to tweak it, maybe try a low duration fear, or a -recharge.

I've been playing that exact set just recently, wow. I did a lot of similar things on dark blast, Similar power selection, even put stupefy on dark pit. I'm curious why you didn't get blackstar though? I'm putting in avalanche, and it's been a big part of my dps so far. I also switched to dps focus on secondary over control, I found that it wasn't really working, and the damage bonus protects me much better. My other thought is that you seem to be focusing on defense a lot, which I generally wouldn't on a defender (I play teams and try to avoid aggro). I focused on global recharge bonuses, and it's been paying out pretty well. In that same vein, I tend not to slot the casted shields that much? The powers themselves don't benefit from the end/recharge, and as I mentioned I don't focus so hard on survivability. I just dual-slot resist IOs.

Y'all are schooling me so hard on traps. I'm starting to think the biggest flaw in the set is the descriptions. This set plays so differently from everything else but allows for unique strategies. I do stand by most of my initial tweaks though, and I think the set needs updating to keep up with the faster pace the game is at now.

So I've noticed a lot of opinions are based on what AT you are playing, which makes sense. I have a Defender, which makes a lot of the DPS redundant. Not that I don't love luring enemies into a death trap, but in the time it takes to set up, I could just use my secondary. Defenders (and presumably Corruptors) benefit most from the buffs and aggro management. I saw someone say they use the Seeker Drones to eat alpha, which is a wild idea. Controllers I would guess are the ones benefiting from the DPS the most. Masterminds have probably the best position here, since their pets can take aggro while they run around and plant traps. They can make the best use of the set in general. That does speak a lot to the sets versatility. The problem with being Jack of All Trades is that anything you can do, someone else does better. On a team of 8 there are very few situations where Traps contributes meaningfully. It shines in long, static AV fights, as Judasace mentioned. It could also be good in situations where the team is getting overwhelmed, as it is very good at stopping anything that moves. The problem in the first scenario is that it's not very good against AVs themselves. The effect of the debuffs shouldn't be understated, but everything in the set is focused on groups. That isn't a flaw, per se, because it is pretty good at handling ambushes and adds. The second scenario is kind of limited. First of all, that's what Controllers are for, to limit aggro until the team moves on. Most control sets have AoE shutdown abilities that can buy a few extra seconds. So if you're a controller, traps is redundant, and if you're not, a controller could do it better. Second, it can't do it in reaction to the aggro, you have to predict that another group is coming and come up with a strategy to halt it. Because of the way NPC groups move, you are very likely to have one random minion blow your motion-based traps before the main group reaches it, and you don't have the eternity it would take to set the time bomb after the fight starts. In the second situation especially, you would pretty much be better off sticking to your team and providing your faster support, as well as DPS/Control. And something I would like to reiterate, because I feel like we're talking across purposes, is that Traps is not a DPS set. An ability doing lots of damage is not necessarily a good thing here. That's Devices. I love using it to solo and I think the damage output makes it unique as a support, but the main focus needs to be auxiliary to killing things, ie. "How does this make the team survive longer and the enemies die faster?"

A lot of the issues in traps are due to a lack of direction. Is it DPS? The top three powers deal AoE damage, two of them are Superior and Extreme. Is it Control? It has an AoE semi-hold, a slow, and an immobilize. Is it Support? It has a regen boost, a defense boost, and a variety of debuffs. Many of the decisions in the past to balance traps involved nerfing the damage, since Time Bomb was too powerful for a support set. But the main issue is at the core of the set's powers: they are slow. If you are solo, you can spend a full minute setting traps, and then waiting to recover Endurance, and then pull the enemy group to you. But in that time, you could have just fought them normally. I've gone through the whole process, mistimed Time Bomb, and then just pummeled them with attacks anyway (on a Traps/Water Defender). Caltrops + Poison trap just locks them in a debuff field and helpless while I work my way through. FFG and Triage Beacon keep me alive, but no better than, say, Plants or Force Field, and those are more consistent. If you are on a team, you have to go a spawn ahead to lay out traps, but good luck timing Time Bomb correctly. The other placeables can't be done at the group in question, since they trigger in presence. It seems like a lot of this is left over from old-school CoH, where pulling enemies out in small groups was a real strategy. I have yet to be on a team in Homecoming that didn't just steamroll 99% successfully. So Trip Mine and Acid Mortar are fine on paper since you can double down, but other builds are just running in and wrecking face in the time it takes you to prep. If, for instance, Storm Summoning required you to hang around for 30 seconds while you whipped up a good cold front before activating Snow Storm, no one would use it. I'm not saying Traps can't be "The Solo Defender Build", or the "Slow and Steady Build", but the slowness needs to be either mitigated or made up for. Time Bomb is a Nuke that takes 20 seconds? Fine, make it drop everything in the spawn. Otherwise you could just do it normally. You can stack 3 Trip Mines and ruin an NPC's day? Fine, but make it go fast or the Blaster is gonna snipe them first.

Ok so I've been playing traps for the first time recently and had some thoughts: Fold Space is a huge game changer, you can drop all your motion traps in one place and tp a whole spawn onto them. Problem 1: Poison Trap is Good Actually, but even with its -res and Trip Mine + Time Bomb + Seeker Drones I've been unable to clear even minions reliably. This is a support set, so DPS isn't exactly top priority, but the fact that I can execute something so convoluted and then have to clean up anyway is kind of ridiculous. In other words, planning /= payoff here. Traps should be that Batman of sets: can beat anyone with enough prep time. Problem 2: Too much interrupt. Trip Mine is difficult to use, but with stealth and planning I've been able to drop it during combat on large teams. Unless the mobs use AoE then you are just screwed. Time Bomb is just impossible. It takes WAY too long to plant, and then there is little indication of when it will go off. As I described above, I try to combine it with Poison Trap and Trip Mine, and have them go off all at once. Timing this is extremely hard, since I can't tell when it will go off. Problem 3: Too many sub-par powers. Web grenade is worthless. Single target immobilize? You can buy those. Most of the other powers are so specific that you have to build your entire play style around them. All of the explosives are worthless on teams. The support abilities are worthless solo. If you are stealthing, FF Generator and Seeker Drone are liabilities more than aids. Solutions: Web Grenade: Replace it. Maybe some kind of End Drain would work instead. Caltrops: You've done nothing wrong and we're glad you're here. Triage Beacon: MORE POWER. Make it move, or make it do periodic heals. Regen is old school we need something with a punch. Or boost recovery too, like plants. Acid Mortar: IDK I skipped this. FF Generator: This thing is pretty good actually. I just wish it wouldn't grab aggro when I'm solo. Maybe let it respond to pet commands so I could make it stay still? Poison Trap: People bash this and I don't know why. I have dropped it in combat and locked entire mobs while my team ruined them. The hold could be more consistent and I wish activation were faster. Also the trigger range could be bigger, I've placed this and had it sit there the whole fight because the mob wouldn't scoot 6 inches to the right. Seeker Drones: Worthless. These last few powers are the confusing part, because they make you think the set should do damage. Option 1: More drones. Make this a swarm that can consistently hit things. 99% of the time they just fly off immediately and mildly annoy your enemy. Option 2: These things are a debuff actually? Make the explosions hit more things, make the debuffs worthwhile. I swear I just learned they could disorient while writing this. Option 3: Replace it entirely. Make them fire Web Grenades repeatedly. Make them buff your support. Make them buff your team's damage. Or something else, IDK. Trip Mine: Let it take interrupt reduction enhancements. I feel like it used to? I think the idea was to reduce damage output. So either don't put "Superior" in that description, or have it do something else. Hear me out: Cut the damage down a bit. Three charges before recharge, like combat teleport. You throw them in front of you ~10 feet, no interrupt. 2 second timer before they "Activate". Then they go boom if an enemy comes within range. You can cover a hallway, or just throw them around in battle to cause chaos. you could even put a -ToHit or light Disorient on it. Time Bomb: Don't make this sound so cool if it isn't awesome. Make the damage gooder Visually display timer so I know when boom Make it a static pet that I can tp into place if I have to Make it take interrupt enhancements so I don't have to be a psychic to use it. Seriously, it's like 20 seconds between button and boom right now, not only can I not make my team wait patiently to time up with this, but mobs will just wander away in the meantime. Other thoughts Traps needs to come with stealth. Either port Field Operative from Devices, or make like a Stealth Field Generator that buffs your team This is a SUPPORT set. Really I shouldn't be using it as DPS. I love that it is, but every power needs to in some way alter the flow of battle, not just hit things. I'm a Defender, that's what my secondary is for. And I don't mean bump up the knockback, because I don't hate people like that. Fold Space is such a game-changer here. Maybe build it into the set? Replace Time Bomb with like Spacial Warping Device. You plant it in a group of enemies, and after some amount of time, they TP to your location, maybe getting stunned or knocked down like Wormhole in Grav Control.