WumpusRat
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Posts posted by WumpusRat
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I use AE tickets to stock up on rare salvage all the time. A lot of times I'll level a character up through arcs into the teens, and then use AE to grind them up to 22nd so I can slot 25th level IOs. I probably have tens of thousands of tickets lying around, and a crafting area in my supergroup base with salvage bins for everything. 15-20 of every common, 6-7 of every uncommon, and 5-6 of every rare. If I ever need to craft something, it's all right there to do.
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I've seen some odd level disparities in TFs of late. Just last night I ran a Yin with some people, and in the SAME MISSION I saw -1 minions, even-level minions, and +1 minions. So no difficulty changing was going on. On a Numina today I watched enemies change con mid-fight. Looked into a room, saw a bunch of red-con minions, then when the team ran in to fight, they were suddenly orange con. Weirdest thing.
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She's not my main anymore, but she was for a while. My darkside tanker Maxima (she's more of a rogue, as she occasionally forays into doing something vaguely noble out of self-interest, or just to mess with other villains).
"Only a Lad" by Oingo Boingo. I have the lyrics to the song in her bio, with some slight changes to turn it into "Only a Lass" (her real name is "Jane", so instead of the song saying "Johnny" I replaced it with "Janey", and of course all the he/his/him's with she/her.
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On 12/7/2022 at 12:31 PM, InvaderStych said:
aaaaaah-Yup ...
... iirc it's two hits and pointing towards the target with the weapon ...
*Clank* *Clank* *Point*
... (edit) ... In general /SD gets some interesting animation quirks. There's an alternate for Brawl that is backhanding someone with the shield. Fun at low levels.
I just finished leveling up and incarnating my shield/axe tanker (she's a D&D fighter portaled into Paragon). The taunt is pointing your weapon at them and shouting, then smacking your shield with the weapon repeatedly until you get interrupted or do something.
And backhanding people with the shield is why brawl is still on my hotbar, even at 50. I put an acc/dmg in it, and use it to finish off enemies that are clinging to life by a thread. Either slap them with the shield, or if they're down you kick them in the face.
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On 12/2/2022 at 1:17 PM, josewales said:
I have fortify pack to slot a Gambler recharge. My question are MMs playing and slotting right? I comfortably mow down 4/4’s with 75 S/L resist and over 20% defence. Yes I understand the pet spam, but I am constantly fighting bedside the pets. The only thing that slows me down is the 1 minute refresh buffs. That is my only complaint and wish it was increased to a 2 or 5 minute perma . Raven is a nasty cone aoe and am constant spamming to keep the 20% bonus for the pets. There is no sitting back with the beasts. That’s why I like the build. It’s an aggressive play style. As for the damage…I just got some incarnates on a new demon/thermal. The dps I find doesn’t isnt much different. The raven is a better controlled air compared to the demon pet aoes. Anyways…I am still scratching my head why no love. The build is pretty good imo.
Well, you have to remember that powers aren't meant to be balanced around having all sorts of IO sets and procs. They're meant to be balanced around SO slotting. So saying "I do fine with them with my fully loaded IO'd out build and incarnate powers" doesn't really say much for actual balance. I was mowing stuff down with my fully built mercenary/traps build before the changes as well, but that doesn't mean the mercs weren't in dire need of adjusting.
Also, as I said, the set's damage hinges almost entirely on Fortify Pack's passive bonus -- the ability for the pets to crit. If you actually use the FP "buff", your pets' damage will drop drastically, as they lose +20% damage and the ability to crit for 60 seconds. Which is why most people (myself included) only use it as a mule power, and not something you actually want to USE, which is a terrible point to be at for a power in the kit.
Apparently their goal is to revisit Thugs, Demons and Beast Mastery in the same vein that they did for the other sets, so we'll see what happens when they get around to it. I'd really like to see Fortify Pack simply done away with, and the +damage/crit from it shifted over to the Pack Mentality stacks, so that power slot could be used for something actually useful that you'd WANT to use, rather than just a mule power.
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Beast Mastery needs some attention. Right now it's absolutely the bottom-tier of MM sets, and the only thing that keeps it slightly viable is the crit bonus from Fortify Pack. And honestly, an entire set's performance shouldn't hinge on a single power. The easiest way to test this is to create a Beast Mastery MM on test, kit them out however you want, and kill a few groups of mobs. It'll likely go just fine. Then use the Fortify Pack "buff", and watch your damage PLUMMET. The problem is that the defense buff wipes out your Pack Mentality stacks to turn it into defense. Which, in and of itself, wouldn't be a huge deal. The problem is it also "prevents the pets from gaining Pack Mentality while it is in effect". So for 60 seconds, your pets lose +20% damage and the ability to crit. The cooldowns on the various buffs/debuffs/heals they have need to be drastically lowered, as well, especially given that they pop them on-cooldown even when not in combat. And the lioness puny +6% defense for 15 seconds buff is on a 120s cooldown. That's nuts.
I'd like to see Beast Mastery, Thugs and Demons get the same overhaul that the other sets got. Resist/defense buffs in the first upgrade, and something specific to those pets in the second. The tier-1 thugs could likely use a bit of buffing as well on the defensive end. They have even less defense than the ninjas do (tier-1 thugs have zero resists, zero defense, only the pyro gets some fire resist). Demons are very solid, but streamlining them to bring them into parity with the way the other MM sets work now would be good.
Personally, I'd love to see Fortify Pack just nixed entirely, and give Pack Mentality the innate bonuses that FP gives them. Then change Fortify Pack into something different, that could be unique to that set.
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One thing I noticed after testing out a few things is that the numbering system breaks down once you get past about 23 pages.
The number of dots on the bottom doesn't change, but it will skip a few numbers. And even scrolling back and forth won't actually show you the correct number. To test it I just kept shifting a character further and further right to extend the number of tabs of characters that it would have to jump through to get to her, and the numbers started vanishing. It would go "page 1, page 2, page 4, page 5, page 7", etc. And even if I manually scrolled back and forth, it would never show me the proper number. So if you reach a certain number of pages, you lose the ability to quickly jump to that page of characters.
That's most likely due to the fact that the code never imagined people would have 200+ characters, I'd guess.
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Mastermind powersets are the most difficult to add, from what I understand. Because what the power summons is hard-coded into the power. I recall the original devs saying that's why they couldn't (easily) do pet customization.
If the Homecoming devs can create new MM sets, then it shouldn't be much of a leap to simply re-create the existing sets, allowing them to disentangle the static pet summons and opening up more options for ALL sets.
Arachnos, Council, Family, Longbow, Carnies, Circle of Thorns, etc, etc, etc...
So many interesting flavors of Mastermind potential.
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Not sure how difficult it would be to accomplish this, but something that would be kind of nice (especially for those of us with tons and tons (and tons) of alts) would be to make a label for each page of characters.
If you mouse-over the page icon at the bottom it just says "Character Page #".
If you could name them, that would make sorting characters so much easier.
"Masterminds", "Blasters", "Fantasy Adventurers", "Genetic Abominations", etc.
I know I'd love to sort mine by the various groups I have for them. I have several pages that are for my D&D adventurers, my alien race, my 'evil cabal of villains' group, etc.
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Beast Mastery suffers from two major issues, imo.
1) The buffs/debuffs the pets have have cooldowns that are far, far too long. And the AI will cast buffs whenever they're off cooldown, making it spam their abilities every time they recharge, even outside of combat. Given that the buffs are short duration (15-20 seconds) and have 90-120s recharges, it means you're not getting anywhere near the use out of them you should be.
2) The set is completely reliant on the passive bonus of Fortify Pack. Without the crit bonus, BM's damage is miserably low. And if you ever USE Fortify Pack to give them some bonus defense, they lose both the ability to crit and the +damage effect of Pack Mentality for 60 seconds, in exchange for a defense bonus. So you have to choose damage or slightly higher defense. You can't have both. The power shouldn't have such a massive penalty.
Overall, the set needs a lot of work. Cut the cooldowns of the various buffing powers the pets have in half, or more -- the set is all about pure melee damage, after all, so it should be the best at that. The lionesses and the dire wolf need a couple more attacks to give them a proper attack chain, and the heals need much lower cooldowns (60s for a 120ish heal is pretty miserable).
Then Fortify Pack needs to be retooled. The set shouldn't be so reliant on this one power, and it shouldn't have such a massive penalty to use. What I'd like to see is changing it around to function more like Staff Mastery, in that you have several toggles you can switch on to direct your pets to fight in various ways. Make aggressive and defensive stances just provide bonuses, not penalties, with the ability to switch between the two as necessary. Could even add a third or fourth one if you really wanted to. Maybe 'Harrying tactics', where they slow, trip, and cause bleed damage.
But the set definitely needs some work.
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While I've definitely run a lot of builds that have serious endurance issues while leveling, honestly I think part of the fun for me is reaching a point where I can do all the stuff I was doing before, and not run out of end. It's a big sense of accomplishment for a character when I've gotten my end management "just so" and can still fight my way through stuff effectively and conserve my endurance at the same time.
There are always solutions to end costs: slot more end reduction, both in your toggles as well as your attacks. Does it mean sacrificing a bit of damage or defense in order to do it? Yep. But learning that balance point is important.
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On 11/22/2022 at 11:18 PM, Supertanker said:
I'd like to see new Epic Pools for all ATs, covering more themes. Most have Fire and Ice sets, but how about Storm powers, or Kinetics? Maybe a set using the new Symphony powers. Or a mini-Mastermind set (like a Sidekick.)
The good thing about the Epic Pools is you can only choose one, so they're easier to balance, and they can add some flavour to make your character feel more unique.
Considering that the "Ninja Tools" epic pool exists, you could easily create more within that sort of theme.
Archery Skills -- give a few ranged attack options, so you could have (say) someone who uses swords pull out a bow to fire off a couple shots at range.
Magic Staff -- allow someone to pull out a staff, ala Scorpion's mage, and use some magical powers through it (though this would be nice as an entire set)
Throwing Knives -- for 'vigilante-types', who have some various thrown blades on them (standard, poisoned, etc)
Apprehend -- non-lethal takedown tools (slapping cuffs on someone, boloing their legs, etc)
Sidearm -- pull out a gun and shoot people, or pistolwhip them with it
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2 hours ago, Harakh said:
You quoted Bellona telling you the spectres are not about damage in their opinion and then continued responding saying why their damage is the issue.
The spectres have an actual Taunt built into their one attack.
Bellona is saying they are helpful to mitigate damage because of this.
I agree.
I solo 4/8 and have many times seen them distracting a boss, and tank AVs when I've come across them.
And the attacks do not need to be max slotted to have effective a little distraction provided by specters - I only slotted life drain.
It was my understanding, based on both what I read as well as what I observed, that their taunt was a magnifier for the damage they dealt, to create a larger threat score for the spectres. If that's not the case, then that's fine, I'm okay with being wrong -- I'm just coming back to the game after a two year hiatus, so there are likely a lot of things that have changed.
In my experience, after around 30th level the spectres weren't being very useful. It might simply be that the secondaries I have for my necros (Nature and Electric) weren't condusive to carefully studying what the spectres were doing, as I was usually busy firing off abilities, and there were so many graphical effects going off that the spectres aren't very visible among it all.
And I was never saying they had to be "max slotted". 3-6 slots was among all three powers, so each one would have 2-3 slots in it. I just have difficulty squeezing that many power picks and slots into my builds, which are usually fairly tight to begin with, mostly because a lot of my slotting aims for set bonuses and the like.
But this has gotten far off topic.
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There are so many things that could be done. If the models for MM primaries weren't hard-baked into the powers (at least that's what I remember reading from one of the devs way back in the day, when people were clamoring for customization), it would be a lot of fun to have options.
Even with just existing models.
Mercs could easily be Council, Longbow, Arachnos, Family, RIP, PPD, Nemesis, all sorts of options
Demons could be Hellions, Outcasts, CoT demons, Rularuu, Carnies
Robots could be Clockwork, Praetorian Clockwork, Council bots, or Malta bots
Necromancy could be Skulls, Infected, Vazhilok, Shivans, Banished Pantheon
Beast Mastery would be a bit tougher, since there aren't really a lot of animal models around, though you COULD use the Snakes or Wailers, maybe
Ninjas could be Knives of Artemis, Cimerorans, Warriors, Freakshow
Thugs have about the same options as Mercs, in terms of variety
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18 hours ago, bellona100 said:
I don't think anyone expects the Specters to be damage dealers. Thats just nonsense. The Specters are like a scaled down Gang War. They help mitigate damage away from the henchmen, MM, and other pets via a strong Taunt.
The spectres' taunt is based on their damage, in that their damage is magnified by their taunt ability (+400%). The problem is that at higher levels, once you get your actual pets slotted up and you buff them with both upgrades, they deal so much more damage than the spectres that the spectres all have to gang up on one mob to make their taunt overpower your pets' damage. They MIGHT hold a minion or lt that hasn't been hit by one of the zombies' multiple aoe attacks (or anything a grave knight hasn't looked at yet, since they deal so much damage that there's no way one of the spectres is going to peel a mob off of it), but that's about it, and you can't direct them, so you can't tell them who to try and peel.
After playing a couple of necro MM's from 1-50, my personal take was that the spectres aren't worth it at higher levels. Not for the slots you need to dedicate to them to make them useful. Those 3-6 slots and 3 power picks can be spent somewhere much more productive, imo. During the leveling process though, they're amazing. I had all 3 attacks in my build up to the mid-30's, which is about where the wraiths really started to drop off, as I only had 2 slots in each attack, and one was accuracy.
If you have a build that you can dedicate a bunch of slots to your attack powers, then by all means use them and the spectres. I tend to try and cram a ton of stuff into my builds and can't generally spare the slots for my attacks on masterminds.
<edit> I keep calling them wraiths. I think it's because that's what they look like to me. 🙂
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The problem with the wraiths is that once you get up past the mid-game, they become more of a hinderance than a benefit. Since you have zero control over them, they can sometimes aggro things you didn't want to fight, or end up chasing enemies around with no ability to call them back. Their damage is incredibly lackluster, as well; at 50th level with +100% dmg, they have a single attack that hits for about 35. Supremacy and other buffs beef it up a bit, but it's still only about half the damage your tier-1's basic brawl attack is doing.
Once I passed about 30th I specced out of the attacks, as they were eating up power picks and slotting that I could definitely use better elsewhere.
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35 minutes ago, No Characteristic said:
Yeah, I'd agree with it being bout ten minutes (if you don't have any freespecs left). Maybe a little longer or shorter depending on the character. All I'm saying is that it shouldn't take even 10 minutes, since it's something that in other games is instant (minus all the time it takes to re-slot everything...).
When I played my warshade back in 2020, I only did regular content (okay that's not true, I did exactly one AE mission, not a fire farm.) And I bought maybe one set of Training Origin enhancements and one set of Dual Origins after that. I've never sent the character money from my now more profitable level 30 alts. She's level 24 now, I haven't played her at all since coming back. And she has a little less than 500,000 influence. I don't remember, but I'd guess at over half of that is a hand-out from a friend. Which is enough for one respec if I bid low and hope, two if I'm lucky or wait to let a bid for 200,000ish go through, which can take several days if you're trying to be that cheap, and exactly zero viable enhancements, only outleveled DOs. So that'd be all my money right when I'd want level 25 IOs or SOs. Now, you can say I was playing the game wrong back then to have only ended up with that much influence. And I definitely was. But that's not really my point.
So why exactly would you NEED to respec your warshade? Just to pull those few enhancements out? That's definitely not what a respec is meant for.
Again, I have to ask WHY you would need to constantly respec your character. You don't need to respec to fix a single slot; respecs are done to rebuild a character, not to minmax every level or two just to tinker with your build. You can do that all you want on the test server.
And saying "it shouldn't take ten minutes" comes across as pretty entitled, imo. SOME games allow free respecs. Most don't. Most use it as a way to get you to spend money (either in-game currency or in some games real life money). Asking for free respecs simply because you don't want to bother spending ten minutes getting the money for one seems really, really lazy. You're asking the devs to change the code because you don't want to spend a couple minutes doing something that you acknowledge is easy and painless.
Just grind out a few million inf, and buy yourself some respecs, if you're that addicted to respeccing your characters. Don't be lazy.
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3 hours ago, cranebump said:
Staff is pretty good, except maybe for the “I stab your feet multiple times!” animation. The thing I like about it is if your big AoE attack misses you still look cool because you’re break dancing.
Hey now, if Kung Fu Hustle has taught us anything, rapidly slamming someone in the foot is painful enough to even stop a nearly-invulnerable Kung Fu master.
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Respec recipes are cheap on the AH. A million or less. Know how long it takes me to get a million inf if I need it, even with lowbie characters?
About ten minutes.
My two "usual" methods:
1) Hop into one of the "level 1" AE missions and set it to tickets, rather than standard rewards. A couple of those can be done in under 5m with even a low-damage build (my record so far with a new necro MM is 2m1s), and you can get ~250-400 tickets per run. I do this all the time on my lowbie characters to get some starting cash after I do the first mission arc or two. Do a few runs until I get 1100+ tickets, use that to buy rare salvage, sell it, boom, my level-5 now has 1-2 million inf, and it took me about 10m.
2) Make a new character, level to 4 quickly (takes about 5-6m), buy flight as your level-4 power, zip around Atlas or Mercy and pick up all the badges to get the 5 merits. Use those 5 merits to buy 15 converters. Sell the converters on the AH. If they're going "cheap" and only about 50k each, that's still 750k. Which is usually enough to snag a respec.
I don't have a "farm" character or anything, though I've tried a few of the big Council spawn maps at +4/8 with my invuln/SS tanker, and she does okay. Just kind of slow due to the lack of big aoe damage (foot stomp + cross punch and her incarnate aoe is all she's got), but she can still make about 100k every 60-90s just pummeling groups of Council dweebs.
While I can see the appeal for having unlimited freespecs, I just don't see the need for it. You shouldn't need to tweak your build that often, and if you do, you need to be out DOING something in order to have a reason to constantly be fiddling with it. Which means you should be earning inf anyway?
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Also one of the big powers of the set, Fallout, can't be used on dead henchmen. Only dead players. Which makes it useless for a solo MM.
That said, I did doodle up a Necro/Rad MM to test out, and was able to run on +1/8 pretty comfortably, so it's not terrible. Just not ideal. -
My general rule I operate by when I'm going out hunting giant monsters on my few characters that can solo them is if I spot one, I'll announce in general chat that I'm going to be killing <monster> in a few minutes, and anyone who wants to join is free to come poke at it too. Those that answer I'll invite to group and wait until they get there, and then we kill it. If nobody answers, well, I'll just kill it myself. I've never gotten so many that I've needed more than a single group, though.
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And afterwards the monster alerts for her showing up is her popping up out of the water wearing an apron, a little paper hat, and towing a barge with her merch kiosks on them, waving passing heroes down to hawk items at them.
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On 11/7/2022 at 7:37 AM, Tiger Shadow said:
The image of Lusca's tentacles showing up in the police station one by one amuses me.
Lusca sitting curled up in a giant jail cell, wearing an orange prison jumper, a little sharpie-drawn "scar tattoo" under one eye, glaring balefully at the terrified little level-3 Hellion gangmember that was assigned as her cellmate.
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I generally have a pretty firm idea of the morality of a character when I make them. Some are more heroic, others are more villainous, and others in between.
Overall, I'd say that most of my characters end up in the vigilante role, as the ones I play the most often (my little alien Rikti-hunters, the plane-shifted D&D adventurers, and my mage cabal) don't have any qualms about killing people or breaking the law in order to get things done. Quite a few have run afoul of Longbow or other heroes when they're after something specific, and see no problem with laying a smackdown on some goody-goody who tries to talk them out of it.
Though lately I've been having the urge to play a full-blown Red Side Best Side character again, and just go around gleefully caving in skulls and wrecking peoples' sh*t.
What Combat Attributes do you monitor?
in General Discussion
Posted
I generally keep track of:
Current HP (I like knowing the number, since there's no numerical display on your hp bar)
Recovery rate
Endurance spend
Resist (usually S/L, though sometimes energy, psi, or something else)
Defense (smash/lethal, ranged, positionals, etc, depending on what sort of character I'm playing)
Exp to next level
Influence