WumpusRat

While an issue-1 server might be interesting to play on for an hour or two out of nostalgia, there's no way I'd play there for an extended time. Level cap of 40 instead of 50, no epic power pools, fitness wasn't auto-granted but you had to choose it as one of your four pools, travel powers limited to 14th level, the exp to level being about 4-5x what it is now...ugh. No thanks.

A kind of combination of those two is one of my D&D bard concepts. When the other adventurers who arrived in Paragon were out beating up criminals and establishing a place for them to all call home, she was out finding out what sorts of social places there were. She can into a bunch of bikers who started hitting on her, and so she started telling stories, jokes, riddles, and basically just won them over. Then they heard her sing, and were captivated. So they decided to stick with her and protect her.

I've done that. Still get the same error. Mids fundamentally broke something in my installation of the game.

I wanted to try using the Mids "copy build to beta server" thing, so I installed it on my main machine (I usually use Mids on my other computer, so I can have it and the game open at the same time). I went through the steps to try and get it to work, and now whenever I try to run HC it gives me a fatal error and crashes to desktop. File: bin/clientmessages-en.bin Unable to locate bin/clientmessages-en.bin Then crashes to desktop. Wtf. Sigh. I should have just left Mids off my main machine.

I pretty much never take assault on blasters, since it's such a small bonus compared to all their others. Maneuvers and tactics sometimes, mostly because of the fact that blasters have enough end management to easily run the toggles, and maneuvers is a good place for a lotg recharge, and as others have said if you don't have aim/buildup in your kit tactics can be decent. Usually the reason I end up taking them is to hit certain defense benchmarks, if I'm building a more scrappy blaster. The 4% defense from maneuvers and 1.88% smash/lethal defense you can get from 2-slotting tactics (rectified reticle) can sometimes make the difference in hitting the soft-cap or not.

I don't have a robots/time myself, but I do have a lot of other robots/ builds (FF, Electric, Sonic, and Traps). My main goal with any MM build is to make my pets as tanky as possible, and keep them alive. I'm not a big fan of the change to move the -regen off the assault bot and onto the MM attacks, since it eats into slotting that I prefer to put into other powers, and in order to match the -500 that the AB used to have, you need to take all three attacks and slot them heavily enough to ensure they connect. So at least 2-3 slots per power, which mildly annoys me. On the other hand, the repair bot has freed up a lot of slotting on my MMs that didn't have a heal built into their kit (all but electric), so I've been able to dump aid other/self/field medic, which does make it easier. With robots, the lack of a 'mule' power means in order to have all 6 auras you're going to need to get all your slotting done on the pets with only 4 slots, which definitely requires a bit of frankenslotting. I'm at work so I can't post a build or anything, but my general setup for those sets is something like this: Tier-1: Superior Mark of Supremacy (aura + one other, usually acc/dmg), Superior Command of the Mastermind (aura + 3 other pieces to aim for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Tier-2: Superior Mark of Supremacy (2 parts), 2 auras (doesn't matter which), 2 parts either Blood Mandate or Sovereignty (aim is for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Tier-3: Superior Mark of Supremacy (2 parts), 2 auras (doesn't matter which), 2 parts either Blood Mandate or Sovereignty (aim is for 70+ acc, 80+ dmg, 70+ end) Slotting the pets like that allows them to fight for extended durations without eating through all their end (although the new prot-bots still blow their end pretty fast, with the new attacks they have), as well as giving 40% global recharge (and for a /time build, will help out a lot towards trying to make Chrono Shift permanent if that's one of your goals). I've found that for the sets that don't have a 4th pet power, trying to work in debuff procs for the pets gets really finicky, as it drastically cuts into their offense, and the tradeoff isn't always worth it (at least to me).

I noticed this one too the other day. My first thought was "Wait, isn't he 45+? Why am I getting him at 43? Oh well." Then ran into a bunch of 45th level mobs, did the mission, and he stopped offering me more.

Kismet is actually a to-hit buff, rather than accuracy. It SAYS accuracy, but it's to-hit. Which makes it a really nice one-slot bonus. Accuracy functions on a multiple, rather than additive. To-hit is the additive. So against a +4 mob the base chance to hit is 55%. With +20% to-hit, it goes up to 75%. With 53% accuracy on top of that, you'd go to 114.5% (75% * 1.53), which caps at 95%. Mobs would have to have +20% defense (which a lot of the cimerorans have, with their shield stuff), or debuff you with -to hit to drop you below 95%. Depending on what you fight a lot, having more than enough chance to hit is a good thing. Especially for the end-game groups (Carnies, Arachnos, Cimerorans, etc), who all have +def, -to hit debuffs, or both. I've died far too often to groups of pissed-off Nemesis soldiers who suddenly gained a ton of defense, to-hit and damage when their majors dropped, and I didn't have enough acc/to-hit to compensate. 🙂

Well, if I remember right your base chance to hit a +0 mob is 75%. Each +1 in level drops that by 5%, so if you're running at +4 you'll have a 55% to hit a +4 mob, and a 50% to hit a +5 mob. Accuracy is a modifier on your to-hit check. So if you have a 50% to hit and +50% accuracy, your odds to hit would go up to 75% (50 + 1.5). To-hit modifies your base hit chances, so if you had the same 50% hit chance, and +30% to-hit, your odds of hitting would be 80%. If you have +20% or more accuracy, you'll be at 95% to hit. So against a +0 mob, if you have +20% to-hit and zero accuracy, you'll still hit 95% of the time (barring debuffs, mobs with +def, etc). Against mobs at higher levels, or mobs with defense or debuffs, accuracy becomes less valuable and to-hit becomes much more powerful. I have very little knowledge about procs, as I rarely use them myself. The ones I do use are generally just included in a set for the final set bonus.

Fortify Pack also tanks the damage output of your pets when you activate it. The passive of FP grants your pets the ability to crit, and a crit chance based on how many stacks of Pack Mentality are active. When you trigger FP, it consumes all stacks to grant defense and regen, but prevents the pets from gaining more stacks for the duration (60 seconds). So making it perma would be significantly degrading your pets' damage output. It's one of the reasons I think the set needs some tweaks (and hopefully will get them when they do the pass on Thugs, Demons and BM soon(ish).) As far as combos go, the ones I've played at 50: BM/Nature -- the most "obvious" choice for a theme. The buffs provide a good chunk of damage and mitigation, as well as healing (though you have to position yourself to properly catch all the pets in the cone). It's a good mix of offense and defense. BM/Kinetic -- far more aggressive, and provides less protection (increase density can buff resists to smash/energy, and substantially so, but that's all), good healing if you focus your pets on a single target to coordinate the healing, and their damage output is extremely impressive with fulcrum shift. Not to mention not having to worry much about endurance due to speed boost (though the +rech doesn't affect them), and zoomie puppies are always fun. BM/Force Field -- rather dull, as FF doesn't provide a whole lot for you to do other than buff your pets and occasionally toss out force bolts to knock stuff in their butt. After the page-5 update it's much more interesting, though still not the optimal choice for "fun", imo. If you mix in ravens with a knockdown proc you can provide an extra level of protection by constantly knocking stuff over. <edit> Doh, just noticed this was from nearly 4 years ago. Ah well. 🙂

One idea for a costume that I think would be fairly easy to implement would be using the "headless" version, but allowing for hoods. So you could have a character who has an empty hood (possibly with soul noir-style glowing eyes), which might be neat.

One thing I've thought would work is tweaking brutes' defensive values to put them midway between tankers and scrappers. They have the same caps as tankers, but struggle a lot more to reach them. Currently, brutes/scrappers get 22.5% base for a lot of their resist shields, while tankers get 30%. Why not split the difference for brutes, and tweak them up to 26%? It would make hitting defensive values a bit easier, and let them lean more heavily into their damage.

From what I understand, they have around a 2% chance to drop at the end of any mission (of any level, I believe). In the last 3-4 months I've found around 40 of them, playing a ton of different characters.

I think a lot of it stems from how people are building characters and declaring certain ATs "overpowered". The current "meta" for building seems to be to stuff as many procs into each attack as possible, and build tons of global recharge, to make the procs go off as much as they can. This tends to benefit tankers a lot, since procs aren't affected by +damage, so it boosts their damage substantially. If you go for more set-bonus oriented builds, brutes are still a good bit ahead of tankers in terms of damage, especially when they get rolling. Tankers hit more targets with aoes, but brutes deal significantly more damage per attack.

I'm leveling a seismic/martial blaster right now, and she's great fun. Going for kind of a "jade warrior" D&D monk build with her. Imprisoning (well, crushing) enemies in jade prisons at range, and beating them up if they get too close. The seismic tremors gives me a decent amount of bonus defense by knocking enemies down a lot.

I've given up on several bases and ended up scrapping them because of the constant shifting of placed objects. The further you get away from the "interior" section of the base, the more degradation happens. I was building a starship down around the "bottom" of the exterior space and every time I'd come back to the base the next day a few things would be out of of place. It was becoming more and more irksome for placing doorways, edging, etc, that I finally just gave up and nuked the base. Something that isn't on the list that I'd like to see is the ability to just create a single massive room for a base. Fill the entire plot with one room, and so be able to build around within or outside of that without needing to play the "fill in all the gaps with rooms/doorways" game. Though this might not be possible if the "entry room" is completely static with no way of adjusting the code for it, or getting rid of the "required gap" that exists when placing hallways and rooms.

One advantage to Master Brawler over Practiced is also that if you exemplar down to a point before you'd have access to MB, it's permanently altered your first two toggles, so you'll have status protection even in the first few levels.

Devil's advocate: You're constantly upping your damage as you level. And fighting heavier and heavier-armored targets. Freak tankers, Crey power armor, Nemesis hulks, etc. Your arrows are capable of punching through even that armor and dealing damage. So you could certainly argue that you're constantly having to up the draw weight on the bow to compensate for the armored people you're fighting (not to mention the ones who are just naturally insanely durable with bullet-bouncing skin). So you may well be continually pushing the limits on the weight you can draw, which can give you a never-ending wobble in your hold position. Sarcasm aside, I wouldn't be against tightening up a lot of the animations. Hell, I'd absolutely love if the cartoonishly-huge arrows were replaced with something more normal-sized for archery. I like the set, but the silly looking arrows do dull some of my joy with it. <edit> And now thinking about it, the idea of creating a very thin character with few muscles who has the largest possible bow and strains to draw it constantly would be a fun concept.

Well, you ARE drawing back a bow that's capable of firing arrows that can pierce through tank armor. I'd imagine it's got a pretty sizable draw weight. That said, there are several powers that have animation bugs at the end of them to make them delay your next action. The most egregious one I've seen so far is the Mercenary MM set, which roots your character into a 4-second animation for what's supposed to be a 2-second cast for all the summons and one of the buffing powers.

And, in response, I said if they could do that without custom-tailoring a build specifically for it and spending tens of millions on temp summons I'd be quite impressed. That was it. Period. I was not challenging you or them to do it. I was making a simple statement: "Wow, that would be impressive if they could do that." If they did it by doing all those things? Well, I'd be less impressed, since the more you weight things in your favor, the easier things become. Obviously. But I'm done responding to you now. You're clearly getting agitated, and I'm not going to just go back and forth with you making accusations about what I am or am not thinking.

I think you didn't read the rest of that sentence. "Millions of inf setting up a specific build for it." As in, not taking a 50th level character, respeccing them for 20th level play and 6-slotting every power usable at that level to load them out with every possible proc and other stuff. If it's a normal character (billion inf build or not) who's just exemplaring down to run it? More power to them. You seem very, very quick to imagine what other people are thinking. Especially when you misread what they said.

I'm at work so I can't take a screenshot, but basically I have it set up like this: Top window Combat (everything) Pet Combat (I play a lot of MMs) Loot (exp, drops, etc) Bottom Window Team/Local/Tells LFG/Broadcast Help Global/General Alerts (monsters, events, etc) NPC Chatter

I'd love to see a 20th level character who could solo Synapse at +4/8 in under 2 hours without burning tons of temp summons and millions of inf in setting up a specific build for it. Seriously. I'd be impressed.

If my teammates are entertaining and we all get along, I don't really care how long stuff takes or if we get the occasional near-wipe (or full wipe), as long as it's not obnoxiously long. Last night I did a Synapse tf that ended up taking 2 hours. But everyone was chatting away, joking around, interjecting snippets of rp, and generally having a good time. Didn't feel like 2 hours.

The RNG definitely has it in for me some nights. I think in all the time I've been playing I've gotten maybe 8-10 purple drops, outside of the "free" first-time-50 one from Market Crash. On the other hand, my converter luck is pretty good. I've gotten countless LotG globals, Numinas, Miracles, and other uniques in just a few conversions. And then the combat rng decides to laugh at me sometimes, like last night when my defender was up against Anti-Matter, and he hit me every other attack despite only having a 10% chance.