kelly Rocket
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Posts posted by kelly Rocket
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For a Mastermind, it's worth noting that the Mercenaries primary has Stimulant on the Medic. If you keep the Medic on passive, he will use it on you constantly, which is basically Tanker level mez immunity.
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Time is simply top tier for MMs, doesn't matter what your primary is, Time and Dark are great with anything.
As far as making inf, try running the Summer Blockbuster event. Reward is a piece of the Overwhelming Force set, and any piece from that set will sell for at least 4 million on the auction house if you aren't impatient. Even if you list it for 1 inf to avoid listing fees, you probably make 1-2 million.
And SBB takes 30-45 minutes to do.
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SS/Fire was only every especially awesomly good in very tailored farmable maps and specific AE content. In most normal gameplay it was decent, not amazing. That's exactly why the real devs never did anything about the Rage crash. Again I think this change was really just a solution in search of a problem.
Uh... the "real devs" did do something about it. The Rage crash fix went in well before the game sunset. It's not something that was added after the shutdown like the new Blaster secondaries and such.
Still doesn't mean they were correct to do so of course.
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the main reason to keep soul extraction is that it's a good place to drop the mastermind unique IO's without having to frankenslot your pets. there are 6 in total that provide defense, regen, and resists to your pet.
dont worry about sets now. just use basic crafted io's until later. and plan your build out beforehand.
I mean, there's that, and also that the Ghost is quite good. I find it spams its hold heavily, and between that and the Lich there's a lot of damage mitigation. I'll quite seriously deliberately get one of my minions killed just to get the ghost out at the start of a mission.
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Yeah, I almost never take a travel power.
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How would we deal with it? Just not care about the theme? Or restrict what kind of customization options you get?
Personally I would say do it with reskin & coloration options. While it would be nice to have the ability to make custom costumes for all of your pets that's probably not practical. However making it so that you can choose different skins and recolor those skins is probably a more reasonable approach. That being said it's still a lot of work.
There's no reason for it to not be practical. We should really be able to design our pets with the same interface we make mobs for the AE.
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I agree more people should play thermal, but disagree entirely that Rad is ‘not amazing at anything’. It’s the most powerful debuff set in the game and also has a great PBAOE team buff too.
Personally, while thermal is a good set, I’d say Rad is a GREAT set.
Rad is the most comprehensive debuff set. All the specialist debuff sets debuff more strongly, Rad just debuffs more things.
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If I were playing with a fixed group and we were all agreeing to take it, that'd be one thing, but I find most players seem to not take leadership at all because they build in a selfish manner,
Be the change you want to see.
I think I already noted I run Maneuvers and Tactics on every single character I make, just about :D
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Even if you stack Assault 8 times, it's still only a 40% team damage increase.
If I were playing with a fixed group and we were all agreeing to take it, that'd be one thing, but I find most players seem to not take leadership at all because they build in a selfish manner, so I'm usually the only person on the team running leadership at all, and one copy of Assault is just... not even noticeable. Even 2 or 3 copies aren't really noticeable.
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That's pretty sweet, considering Lifegiving Spores is a substantial endurance boost for anyone standing in it to start with.
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Same as any other sets for Defender/Corruptor debate. Do you want to do more damage or Buff/Debuff/Heal better?
You go Defender if you're "all in" as a support. You don't care about damage and you just want to be the best support you can be. And you don't intend to solo much.
You go Corruptor if you want to do damage primarily, and also be able to give support, when you feel like it. You go Corruptor if you intend or expect to do any significant amount of soloing.
No hidden tricks in Time or DP that would make one better than the other, but the one thing a lot of people don't realize is that even the secondary debuff effect on your blast set is stronger for Defenders than Corruptors. So since DP is indeed a debuffing blast set, if you want to get the maximum amount of -damage or -recharge out of it, Defender is where you go. With the obvious caveat that you're giving up a lot of damage to get it.
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I consider it solo-able, but not fast ;-)
Slowloable ;-)
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ah...thermal
there is one achilles heel in thermal if you will. the -resist debuff portion of melt armor can actually itself be resisted, so only boss+ it does not provide it's full -resists. the achilles' heel proc does not have this issue as it forces the target to cast a spell on itself. multiple of this io do not stack but refreshes duration.
That's true of all -res debuff powers, Freezing Rain and Sleet and Heat Loss, etc. However, -resist is resisted by the damage resistance of the mob itself, not affected by any other debuff resistance (Including boss resistance bonuses), so the way the math ends up working, is that all -resist debuffs act as a damage buff not subject to the damage cap. If you apply a -30% resist debuff to a mob, ANY mob, it means you will be doing 30% more damage than you were before.
And yes, the Achilles Heel procs are unresistable so they will cut a 90% resist down to 70%, instead of down to 88% like a normal -20% debuff would do to a mob with 90% resist. But as you noted, it doesn't stack. Whereas Freezing Rain and such do stack, and in a weird pseudo-multiplicative way at that.
That said, Thermal can't stack it's -res. I noted in my summary that it's not as good at it as some of the other sets I listed. It's more for keeping your pets alive and sustaining your DPS than increasing it.
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Farsight on a Mastermind only gives a base 7.5% ToHit, but you obviously won't be enhancing that. Because if you don't enhance Farsight for Defense you're an idiot.
Alternatively you can put three Membrane Exposures in Farsight and max out Defense, To Hit and Recharge in three slots (possibly with a fourth slot for a LotG Recharge IO). Set bonuses are nice but you can get them anywhere. I'd rather just max the stats on Farsight and call it a day.
Except Defense sets are the only place you're going to get 12.5% global recharge out of 6 slots (LotG 7.5% + any 5 Red Fortune). Which will also let you pretty well max out the recharge and endurance reduction on it.
Which is sort of critical considering you're aiming for perma Chrono Shift on basically any toon that uses the Time powerset.
Except that Membranes don't preclude including the LotG special IO and there are much better options than Red Fortune for getting perma-Chrono Shift on a Time character, especially a Mastermind. Heck, Superior Mark of Supremacy has a 10% Recharge bonus for 2-slotting it so spread those six pieces among your pets and that's 30%. Add Hasten, 5 LotG 7.5s, an Unbreakable Constraint set in Distortion Field and you're basically there (you can add another purple set somewhere if you really want that extra 0.78 seconds of uptime).
So sure you can 5-slot Red Fortune in Farsight if you want but there are much better options for getting recharge bonuses that don't require you to tank the performance of a key power. Honestly 5% recharge bonuses are chump change, it's rarely worth dedicating slots specifically for them, they're fine for picking up incidentally but they aren't worth tanking a power's performance for.
Even if I were going to Frankenslot Farsight that way, I'd still want Tactics. If nothing else, 6 Gaussians is still the only way you're going to buff all three positionals to that extent with six slots. That's how I soft-capped my Time/DP Defender (With positionals, not typed Defenses, because positionals are better IMO).
And Assault is a garbage power no matter how you slice it, so why would you even want it? 4% extra damage? A power that can't accept ANY Set IOs? Yeah no thanks.
If Assault's 10% were multiplicative it would maybe be worthwhile, but it's not, so meh.
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I've run both sets fairly extensively. I don't have a Nature/ Defender, but I have a /Nature Controller, and a /Nature MM.
Time is better than Nature. Now wait, before the pitchforks and torches, I'm not trying to start a fight, I'm just saying, Time is top tier, and Nature is not. But Nature is still a great set, mid-high tier, and the playstyle is different, so if it suits you better, go for it! You aren't going to regret picking either of these sets unless it turns out to just not be suited to your playstyle. Power-wise, neither will let you down.
Character optimization people get hung up on what's best and what's not best, but at the end of the day either of these will serve you well enough to be viable in end game (IMO).
That said, if you're looking to be the most minmax munchkin possible, Time is better.
Now, on to the comparison!
Time is a very strong buff/debuff set, that competes with Dark for the title of "Just plain best overall support set in the game", IMO. It gives up some -ToHit compared to Dark, but in return instead of a fiddly mob targeted anchor debuff, you get your -ToHit and -Damage on a PBAoE toggle, which is far easier to micromanage the position of, obviously. And then you get -recharge. You get SO MUCH -recharge. Time can easily reliably floor the recharge on nearly everything you will ever fight in the game. This equates to less damage incoming, but also any big buffs, debuffs, heals, and other inconvenient things the enemy may have, are used far less often. FOUR TIMES less often. And then you get a very substantial team +ToHit and +Defense buff, an AoE -Defense and -Resist debuff, and Chrono Shift, one of the VERY BEST team buffs in the whole game, which delivers a big heal and HoT, recovery boost, immediate 15% endurance recovery, and FIFTY PERCENT +recharge buffs to everyone in a 25 foot radius, and it includes you. It costs 20.8 endurance to cast, but when you get it enhanced that will drop down to around 11, which means this power is not only free, but gives you endurance when you cast it.
And on top of all that, you are also a mini-Controller with a single target Hold and an inherent chance to hold proc in your ludicrously good, stackable location-targeted Slow and -Recharge field.
I refer to Time toons as Nope Dealers. Because you create a Zone of Nope, within which enemies are neutered, helpless kittens. And on top of that you buff the team amazingly.
Oh and you also have the widest radius heal in the game, which happens to also be HoT, so it's not super timing sensitive.
It does everything short of making snacks for you while you play.
Nature is a different beast. I like to describe it as being a healer set for people who hate Empathy and Pain. I don't mean to rag on Empathy too much, I had an Empath on live who was one of my most played characters, but... Well, it's...
OK, the appeal of being a healer is that it's active, and the things you're doing generally have immediate, visible impact on the team's survival. You get instant feedback from the health bars, and you have to be watching them constantly, applying heals where they're needed. Empathy and Pain have that, and so does Nature. But Empathy and Pain fall down on the job compared to other sets when it comes to actually reducing incoming damage. Yes, Fort is great, and Adrenaline Boost is an amazing buff. But they're individually targeted. You're going to be picking a few people and basically following a set rotation of applying them every time they come off recharge, and that's... not really super fun. In the same way Force Field used to be not so fun, just refreshing 16 individual buffs every minute or so.
And you're still only mitigating damage for a small minority of the group.
Nature on the other hand has quite good mitigation in Spore Cloud (Though we could wish it had a wider radius). -ToHit, -Dmg, and -Regen. Not bad, decent numbers in each of those effects. Nothing that's going to challenge Dark or Rad, but it's noticeable mitigation. And you have your single target -res, -dmg as well, which helps further reduce damage from individual scary targets, while also making them die faster, so there's that.
Regrowth is a HUGE cone, a strong heal with HoT. There's little to dislike here. It also targets yourself. And of course applies Bloom so your heals get stronger the more you spam them.
Wild Growth is another component of your mitigation. It grants 11.25% Resist(All), and a minor regen boost, and two stacks of Bloom, so it's really quite good, when combined with the -ToHit and -Dmg of Spore Cloud. You can (And probably should) enhance the resist on it.
Spore Cloud is your anchor debuff as noted previously.
Lifegiving Spores. How much can I praise a power? It's a toggle Heal Over Time, you pick a spot and it creates a mushroom ring on the ground and any ally inside it is healed for a small but entirely noticeable amount (Almost 80hp, fully enhanced at level 50) every 4 seconds. This takes a lot of pressure off you, and is really way more incredible than it sounds. Also, what a lot of people don't realize, is that this power is literally free, as long as you're standing in it. It gives 1% endurance to anyone in it, every time it ticks, which is every 4 seconds, and the endurance cost is about 0.25 end per second. Unenhanced. Enhanced with even the smallest amount of EndRdx or EndMod (Or both!) it gives you endurance to run this toggle, as long as you stand in the area of effect. Fully enhanced with both EndRdx and EndMod, it gives you about 1.6 endurance net profit, every 4 seconds (And every teammate standing in it is getting a free 1.99 end every 4 seconds), which translates to a net profit of 0.4 end/second for you, and 0.497 end/second for any teammates in the effect area. You are literally providing a second copy of Stamina to everyone standing in the mushroom ring. On top of healing them. And gaining endurance yourself in the process.
There is so much win in this power.
Anyway, then you have Wild Bastion, which is a PBAoE emergency heal that also applies a nice 25% absorb shield which can be easily enhanced up to 50%. This power can and will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It won't full heal the entire team, but it'll heal close to 700hp and then give them an absorb shield equal to half their HP bar on top of that, to give you breathing room to heal the rest with Regrowth, and do whatever else you need to.
Rebirth is a no-downside Absorb Pain masquerading as a Resurrect. It's a massive Heal Over Time, if you land it before the target drops, and if you're a little slow it rezzes them with most of their health, all of their endurance, and still applies the huge HoT. Granted it doesn't have the "instantly back to full health" effect of Absorb Pain, but it also doesn't wreck you, or leave you unable to heal yourself, and there's no chance of casting it a split second too late and blowing the cooldown on it for no effect but to screw yourself. It's one of my favorite rez powers in the game, up there with Phoenix.
Entangling Aura is a PBAoE toggle hold. I mean, that speaks for itself. Yes, it's only going to hold minions and LTs without help. But you have a TOGGLE that holds every minion and lt. near you. This is amazing.
And finally Overgrowth. Overgrowth. My god. It's an awesome buff. It's maybe not as incredible as Time's Chrono Shift and it's +50% recharge. But it's still amazing. The endurance discount alone is huge. Throw in the damage buff and ToHit buff and 5 stacks of Bloom (20% Heal bonus to everyone affected by Overgrowth when you cast it, for 20 seconds), and it's just sexy. Did I mention it can be perma'd?
Ultimately, for me, the TL;DR is that Time is a little stronger overall, because it's Buff/Debuff centric and Nature is Heal centric, but both are great sets, and the choice comes down to what you want to play:
You play Time if you want to be a godlike Defender who can wade through melee like a Tanker and laugh as you nerf the foes into oblivion and turn your team into unstoppable buzzsaws of death, and also heal a little when necessary, all without having to expend much time and attention on the set (It's mostly long duration buffs and debuffs that only have to be recast at fairly long intervals), freeing you to use your blast set more.
You play Nature if you really want to be a healer, but you can't get past Empathy and Pain being so sub-par compared to Buff/Debuff sets, and you want a Support set that demands most of your time and attention, as opposed to Time's set-and-forget play.
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My build doesn't solo great, but I built it to be pure team support and lean hard on AoE attacks rather than ST attacks, because I want to spread my debuffs far and wide.
That said it still does OK, but I'd definitely prefer not to solo on it.
Side note: Mine is not a time cop. He's a time traveling cowboy from the past. The Navy Colts are too cool to pass up.
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Honestly I would probably embrace the "Controller-lite" aspect of TA snd make Entangling Arrow a targeted AoE immob instead of single target.
The existence of Time creates some precedent for this, with its ST hold and AoE chance for hold. Given immob is soft control, I really don't see a problem with TA having it as an AoE.
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Seems like a majority of people who debate against rage are comparing it directly to build up without looking at the respective sets they are baked into.
This, exactly. The downside of Rage is that it's part of Super Strength, which would be by far the weakest of all melee sets without it running non-stop. With it, SS is on the weak side of middling at best. Those who argue in favor of turning Rage into Build Up should also argue in favor of massive buffs to the rest of SS's powers. It cannot be examined in isolation.
I already did, several times :)
Increase the base damage of Punch and Jab. The damage from Haymaker, Knockout Blow, and Haymaker is already decent, though I wouldn't turn away buffs for them too. Change to Build Up and all of the problems mentioned in this thread about Rage go away forever.
At the cost of making SS just like the rest.
I don't feel that homogenizing mechanics is the solution to balance.
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That is how I remember it too, they probably just wanted pets to run up & get owned.I think it's safe to say that if the devs tried to fix it and couldn't, it can't be fixed.
Except for the time they said power customization (colors) would be too hard to do ...
I've been an app developer for longer than many of you have been alive and sometimes it's just that devs get locked into looking at things a certain way. Don't lose hope; some new kid might look at the code and go "Aha!"
They never said it would be impossible, they only said that it would be a massive amount of work. That's a big difference from "we can't figure out how to get there from here."
I'm open to being surprised, however. But if it was as simple as removing the brawl attack from the pets, I'm sure the old team would've done that.
I still recall the devs saying they didn't want to remove brawl from the pets in the old days, not that they couldn't or that it would be too hard.
If there's any actual issue with it, I'd think it would be that the pets would act like some of the ranged-only PvE mobs do, and try to back away to break melee range, and possibly end up in a chain of running away from the melee enemies... But I'd actually be much more OK with that than with having them run in to brawl.
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Farsight on a Mastermind only gives a base 7.5% ToHit, but you obviously won't be enhancing that. Because if you don't enhance Farsight for Defense you're an idiot.
Alternatively you can put three Membrane Exposures in Farsight and max out Defense, To Hit and Recharge in three slots (possibly with a fourth slot for a LotG Recharge IO). Set bonuses are nice but you can get them anywhere. I'd rather just max the stats on Farsight and call it a day.
Except Defense sets are the only place you're going to get 12.5% global recharge out of 6 slots (LotG 7.5% + any 5 Red Fortune). Which will also let you pretty well max out the recharge and endurance reduction on it.
Which is sort of critical considering you're aiming for perma Chrono Shift on basically any toon that uses the Time powerset.
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Looking at all these builds.
I'm asking only because I am a big defense cap guy..
Any reason why not capping defense.
I know DP is a bit centered around melee range but getting close to defense cap makes a MASSIVELY huge difference.
Couple things. Time gives a -ToHit debuff, which functions exactly 1:1 as a self-defense buff would, except that it's subject to the enemy's debuff resistance. But Time's Juncture gives my build an AoE field of -23.74% ToHit to all enemies within 25 feet of me. That's similar to an extra 23.74% defense, at least against those enemies, and assuming no debuff resistance.
That said, my version of the build is soft capped, or at least close enough (Oh no, the enemy may hit me 5.6% of the time instead of 5% of the time!). And then has the -ToHit added on top of that for funsies. In practice it should basically be Incarnate capped against almost everything.
But beyond that... Time is a set that gives a huge (50%) recharge bonus in Chrono Shift. It seems like it would be a horrible waste to not make use of that and try to get as much recharge as possible out of it. Especially for perma-Chrono Shift, as CS is an incredible team buff.
So yeah, priorities. And compensating factors :D
For me, getting the soft capped defenses was important, but getting that last 0.6% in Melee and AoE wasn't worth giving up any of the recharge bonus or special effects (Like the Immobs in my AoEs, and such).
Alllllso... Hail of Bullets gives you +15% Defense(All) when you use it, as long as you hit at least one enemy with it. So there's that. Granted, it only lasts 5 seconds, but on my build that means I'm hitting a Defense of some stupid number like 59.4% for those 6 seconds, and benefiting from the -23.74% ToHit from Time's Juncture, for an effective defense to the tune of 83.74%.
And then I have Veng. In fact, as long as one member of the team goes down every two minutes or so, I have perma-Veng.
I think I'm fine :D
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I was so disappointed with how terrible thugs looked and prayed that one day I would be able to reskin them as The Family and have my mobster mastermind I always wanted.
Agreed. This specific thing is why I want Pet Customization :D
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There's no such thing as too much ToHit, in my opinion. I take Tactics on all my toons, including /devices blasters who have Targeting Drone :D
Farsight on a Mastermind only gives a base 7.5% ToHit, but you obviously won't be enhancing that. Because if you don't enhance Farsight for Defense you're an idiot. And you'll probably want to put some sort of Defense IO Set in Farsight because Defense Sets have great bonuses in general. So you won't have room to enhance the ToHit. Supremacy is another 10%. +17.5% isn't enough ToHit bonus for me, so yeah. I'd get Tactics too.
Assault is a piddling +10% damage, when your bots will already be doing 225% from enhancements and Supremacy, which means the actual percentage increase you get out of Assault is like 4% since it's additive, not multiplicative. So yeah. Not worth the endurance cost IMO.
As someone who plays Time a lot, I agree that Temporal Selection is really the only skippable power. I mean, Time Crawl is kind of skippable, but only Defenders can skip it, so no help there.
The buffs from Temporal Selection are quite meh. The actual use you end up putting it to is the fact that it basically doubles the healing the person you stuck it on gets from Temporal Mending. If you can get your recharge up enough to keep it up on multiple pets, it's maybe worth it... but... It's less important than basically everything else in Time.
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I have a Mercs/Time, and he can handle most anything. But that's because Time can handle most anything. Is he hot garbage? No. Would he do better with almost any other primary? Yes.
Doesn't mean it's horrible, but there's nothing you can do that will change the Mercs damage output being poor. And unlike Bots where hitting 32 changes them from "Oh god they kill so slowly" to OH GOD THEY KILL SO FAST!", the Commando and the final upgrade power don't really do a ton for Mercs.
They're still not garbage or useless, but they're slow, and they'll always be slow, and there's not much you can do about it. Slotting an Achilles in every pet helps, but it's still not enough to make them anything like top tier damage.
Also you will curse the Fir Bolg when you first reach Croatoa. You will curse them more than you have ever cursed anything in your life.
There's a handful of secondaries I'd strongly recommend considering for Mercs however.
Time - Time is just a top tier MM secondary in general. It's great mitigation (-ToHit, -Damage, -Recharge for the enemies, and +Defense for you and the pets) and you get tons of recharge out of it as well. It has CC built in (An ST hold and an AoE slow + chance to hold). It has a wide radius heal with HoT that makes it less timing sensitive, and better able to reach all your pets if they end up spread out. It's also *reasonably* passive, allowing you enough time to micro your Mercs to have *some* sort of chance of keeping them from spending all their time in melee.
Dark - The other top tier MM Secondary. Focuses on -ToHit and CC, with a little bit of minor defense and resist help in the form of Shadow Fall. Also helps keep your pets from accidentally aggroing things by getting to close, with the stealth in Shadow Fall. Good heal, good debuffs, nice CC, Dark is Dark. Everyone knows it's good.
Storm - No, really. Yes, the healing sucks, but as Mercs are all range, Hurricane is really useful for them, and more importantly, Freezing Rain is a great, stackable -res, which can help make up for your lack of damage. With sufficient recharge in your build, you can get 3 instances of FR going at once, for a staggering -90% resist to everything in the rain area. You also get Steamy Mist for a very small buff to defense and some decent resists (But only to a few odd damage types). Put a Sudden Acceleration KB->KD in Gale and spam it for chain knockdown as part of your mitigation strategy. Not going to lie and say it's top tier, but it works decently with Mercs.
Cold - Shore up your Mercs' defenses with the ice shields, and bring even more -res to the field than Storm can. If it had a heal of any kind it would be perfect. Alas...
Thermal - Thermal is an oft-underestimated and very solid set. It has resist shields that help a bit, and heals excellently, while also bringing some quite decent debuff to bear. Unfortunately the debuffs are all at the end of the power list, so they come quite late, and the resistance shields and healing aren't always enough to keep your fragile pets up. It doesn't have the obvious potency of defense based support like FF or Cold, but when your minions do get hit, they're at least less likely to die in one shot, and you have the healing to bring them back to full from anything short of being a red smear on the pavement. In the late game, you have -res to bring to bear, albeit not as much as Storm or Cold can manage.
Time/DP or Time/Sonic
in Defender
Posted
They serve different purposes. Sonic is not "the best" Defender secondary. It's just one of the best.
Sonic and Dual Pistols are both Tier 1 secondaries for Defender IMO (The Tier 1 secondaries being Dark, Dual Pistols, and Sonic).
Sonic is better if you want to improve the team's damage output, but Dual Pistols is better if you want to improve the team's survivability. It depends entirely on which of those two things you want to focus on. But given that you're playing Time, I'd recommend Dual Pistols. If you want to be helping the team melt things faster, then I'd pick a primary more focused on that like Storm or Cold.