WumpusRat

To look at it from the TTRPG Champions perspective (a game I used to play constantly), you did the equivalent of taking your character with 8 PD and 30 stun up to facetank the enemy brick with 75 str. It punched you. You dropped. That's about it. This whole thing can be chalked up to a learning experience if you look at it the right way. "Oh, this happened because the TF was set with these parameters. Clearly I can't do this tactic against AVs. Huh. Good to know." That SHOULD have been your takeaway from it. Instead, you came to the forums and complained that the game is "broken" because when the odds are heavily stacked against you, you can't face-tank an enemy designed to take on entire teams. It doesn't matter that you were "mid-animation and couldn't react". You jumped into range and aggro'd the AV. The AV responded, and slammed you into the floor. You could have popped a breakfree in advance "just in case", since as a defender with no cc protection, getting stunned/held/immobilized when you're right next to an angry purple-con ANYTHING is going to cause a lot of pain. You made a tactical error and paid the price for it. Learn from it.

Could be. I suppose it's just that pretty much every character I've made in the last year or so has been a vigilante or rogue, so one of the first things I do is head to Null to switch alignments, and just do all the other stuff while I'm there as well. 🙂

I'm just curious, though. You KNOW you can just go to Null and have him turn off the "high speed pinball" effect, but you...choose not to? So you can be annoyed by it when it happens? I don't get it.

"Welcome, recruits. The six of you have been specially chosen from several military services around the world to become part of the Malta Group. You were chosen due to your skill, intelligence, and overall competence, and your personal histories as of this moment have been wiped clean. You no longer exist. In front of you is the standard loadout for all Malta recruit members. You have body armor that is capable of withstanding directed energy attacks from superpowered beings, strong enough to stop up to fifty-caliber rounds, and tactical goggles that allow for full-spectrum vision even in the most adverse circumstances. Particularly useful against those superhumans who can bend light around themselves to become invisible. And this is your weapon, the Mark-4 Specialized Ability-Prevention rifle, or SAP. It is one of the key tools Malta uses to neutralize enemy superhumans. The fact that you are being issued these weapons is how much faith we have in you. Drills start at sixteen hundred. Dismissed." *several hours later* "So, how many of the sapper recruits made it back?" "None. As usual." "Maybe someday one of them will survive long enough to be promoted to Minion..." "Hah! Not likely."

I really enjoy my merc/thermal. Drop forge on the spec-ops and commando, serum them all up, thermal shields, and they're sitting at 90% resist vs everything but psionic, around +65% damage (serum, supremacy, assault, and +95% for the ones with forge) and slap the target with melt armor, and ... well, it tends to melt.

Manticore isn't all that short, really. He's about 5'10" going by the height slider within chargen. I walked my character that's 5'2" over and stood next to him, and the top of my head is just above his chin. If you don't adjust the height slider, the default male character is 6'5" or 6'6". The default female is around 5'8". A good chunk of the in-game furniture are scaled for VERY large characters. But a lot of other things, such as office chairs, tables, desks, etc, are scaled for characters who would be around 5'0" or so, given how small they are.

I have a couple of characters that use the Presence pool. On my shield/axe tanker, I skipped taking taunt from my main set and just picked it up in presence instead. Intimidate is mostly just a placeholder, and I just have an acc/end in it, and almost never use it. Unrelenting is a good emergency heal, and the long cooldown doesn't bother me since I have enough defense that I don't need to use it very often. On my StJ/willpower scrapper, I have the presence pool to kind of control my aggro to a degree. Pacify for dumping aggro, taunt for peeling things off squishies, and unrelenting for the healing and durability when my regen is being overwhelmed. I'm not a huge fan of having to take powers just to unlock something that you actually want, but it's not an issue that really needs "fixing", imo.

It's definitely going to vary, though from what I've seen on numerous runs where people are trying to do it efficiently but not "we're going to finish this in record time, yo!", from the ones I remember: Penelope Yin - 30m Manticore - 60m Synapse - 60-90m (this one can vary a lot) Citadel - 60m Numina - 45m Positron-1 - 45m Positron-2 - 45m I haven't really done many redside TFs lately, so I don't remember the times on any of those.

I'm not sure offhand. However, you can always go to the test server, give yourself a few thousand prismatics, and see what they look like in-game.

Yeah, depends a lot on the power in question. Sometimes the dark setting with light colors doesn't work right, and light setting with dark colors does. I just wish there was a "nofx" option for every power, just to give more choices.

I generally try to minimize the intrusiveness of power effects as much as possible. Setting some powers to "dark" and then choosing the lightest possible colors to make them translucent, setting armor toggles to minimal fx (or nofx if possible), etc. For things like attacks, I'm fine with leaving them as default or coloring them to fit the character's motif, but for stuff that gets toggled on or thrown on other people, I want to make it as minimal as I can. Having someone throw neon-green ice and fire shields on you so all you can see is a blob of color running around as you're fighting is annoying. 🙂

It depends on the secondary/primary I'm using. But my standard is: Health - Panacea proc, Numina recovery/regen, Miracle recovery Stamina - Power Transfer heal proc, end mod, dmg/end mod, Synapse end mod/runspeed (gotta go fast). Very few of my builds are so insanely tight that I can't spare a couple of extra slots for stamina, not to mention I don't like to suck wind until 50+ and incarnate powers. But I guess I just build a lot differently from other people, since others seem to have just the shifter proc in stamina and nothing else, but can get to 50 without flatlining on end every fight. When I've tried it, I'm out of end REALLY fast, since the proc only goes off every 30 seconds or so.

I figured it out. It only kicks in when you're in combat. I had just finished redoing my build after hitting 50 and was wondering why my resists were about 4% lower across the board than what mids was predicting. After going and poking a mob in PI the resists bumped up to where they should have been, so that was the problem. Error on my part. 🙂

The power Evolving Armor for the Bio Armor set states that it gives a small amount of resistance to everything regardless of which adaptation you have running. Then provides additional resistance if you go into defensive adaptation. However, it's not providing any resistance at all, even in defensive adaptation. Tested it on a brute and tanker, same results.

Yeah, I ran into the same thing when I was doing the "mess with the Family" location event in St. Martial a while back. In the building you go into, there can be upwards of 4 bosses, all with singularities. It becomes a massive game of pingpong to see how long you can survive. Which, admittedly, can sometimes be incredibly fun and a good test for a build.

Yeah, I noticed this earlier today. I was tooling around on my new corruptor at level 9 and poked one of the anniversary crates. Out came three banished pantheon zombies. So I shot one with my blast, quick snipe, and origin power and...it was still at 80% health. I had to run away from them at around 10% health, and I'd managed to get ONE of them down to around 25%. They're definitely overtuned for low level characters.

The maintenance drone was such a huge improvement. I was able to drop the medicine pool entirely on my /FF, /Traps, and /Sonic Robotics MMs and just let it do the work. Just have to get the recharge down enough that you can summon another one as needed, since it burns its own health bar to heal the other bots.

Absolutely heal your minions. They're your damage as well as your defense. At very low levels (1-5) losing your minion isn't a huge deal, you can just summon another one. Once you get past 6, you have to summon and re-buff them. Which can take some time, depending on the secondary (and even primary) you use. For instance, re-summoning a tier-1 zombie takes 3.3 seconds. Then you have to upgrade it, which uses another 2.2 seconds. That's 5.5 seconds where all you're doing is re-summoning and re-upgrading. And if you're at 26+ level, you'll need to apply the second upgrade as well, which is another 2.2 seconds. 7.7 seconds of getting that one minion back into the fight. And even longer if you have to re-apply bubbles, cold buffs, resist buffs, etc, from your secondary. Is it better to spend those 7.7 (or possibly 10+) seconds, during which another minion (or more) could die, or spend 2 seconds to use a healing ability? It's almost always better to heal them rather than let them die and re-summon. There are only VERY niche cases where it's better to just let them die.

You don't need anything other than just the Stealth power itself. You can walk right up to mobs and they won't see you, no proc or anything else required. Generally when I take it on a character I have either the LotG global or that + def/end just to make the toggle a bit cheaper to run. On a setup that needs every last bit of defense to reach various caps (both normal and incarnate) that 2.5% or so defense can push you over the edge into the soft-cap range. But it's not always necessary. Stealth is incredibly handy to have, though, and I tend to take it on any character that I can justify their concept as having it.

I don't have many punny character or pet names. The only ones I can really think of would be: My little goblin mage's earth elemental, that she's named Muffin. My bard's reverberant pet named Tempo.

Thematically, a lot of it depends on the character, at least to me. For instance, my shield/axe tanker is a D&D Fighter, so most of her defense would be blocking things with her shield, parrying, stuff bouncing off her armor (since she wears full plate), etc. For my invuln/ss tanker, she's basically just "nigh-invulnerable(tm)". Stuff bounces off of her without doing any damage. The staff/sr scrapper is a Monk, so her not getting hit is literally just her shifting out of the way of an attack, or using Evasion to "hide behind the air" and avoid aoe damage. 🙂 One of my dark armor characters is a girl who is followed around by countless spirits. They just like her and want to protect her. So her damage mitigation and defense is the spirits absorbing the brunt of the damage for her sake. Another dark armor character is a D&D Warlock, so her resilience is simply healing the damage after it's done, so quickly that it heals as soon as it's inflicted, though it's still painful (her patron doesn't mind her suffering PAIN, just not lasting damage). Could go on, but generally the concept of the character dictates to me how their defenses "work" from a story perspective.

My elec/elec defender begs to differ. Short Circuit slotted with Power Transfer followed up by Ball Lightning pretty much flatlines every enemy blue bar in the vicinity. And between the minor end drains on all the other attacks, they don't come back unless they manage to run away for 20-30 seconds. Once I added the preemptive radial interface to boost her end drain even further, it just got seriously unfair for the mobs she goes up against. She's even drained some AVs down to flatline within 10-15 seconds. It depends on your expectation, honestly. On a large team that's steamrolling everything, yeah, end drain is pretty useless. Stuff dies before it can really make a difference, except on the occasional AV or GM. Though draining GMs down to zero end IS pretty fun. But then again, the secondary effects for a LOT of blast sets can be seen as kind of minimally useful on a team that's crushing everything. -Def from radiation or seismic? Eh, everyone's got 95% to hit anyway. -rech from psionic or ice? Stuff dies before their powers cycle anyway. Dot from fire? Yeah, the extra damage is nice, assuming the mobs survive long enough for the dot ticks. Etc. Where end drain really shines is solo, duo, or in a small group. Then draining enemies' end becomes really impactful, at least in my experience. I haven't been disappointed with any of my electric characters at 50. I have an elec/elec defender, an elec/bio sentinel, and an elec/elec blaster. All of them do really well. The "shocked" effect is a nice chunk of bonus damage that hits pretty much everything you shoot at, and you get end back in the process. The thing is, you can slot your powers to increase the end drain. I know not many people want to, because "moar damage is bettah!", but some sets (like Power Transfer and Synapse's Shock) have plenty of +damage set pieces as well as +end modification. Certain powers are obviously more effective at draining than others (Short Circuit and Thunderous Blast are monsters when it comes to draining endurance). Course, if you go with the "2 hamis and the rest procs" slotting setup, then yeah, the end drain isn't going to be as significant. But it's definitely possible to turn an electric character (especially a defender or corruptor) into an endurance-shredding monster that makes Sappers green with envy. I think "stacking charges of end drain and then it finally drains the mob" would be less effective than it is right now. As it stands now, you can fire off one power and drain a chunk of end from mobs, rather than the game having to keep track of all your stacks on every mob. Not only that, but electric blast sets already have a stacking effect on yourself with static, leading to the "shocked" bonus damage/end restoration effect. I guess it depends on what you want out of end drain. Do you want it to be majorly impactful on a big team? Well, then you might have to actually look at all the other secondary effects and go over them, as well, as most of them are so-so at best on a team that's steamrolling stuff. If it's meant to be "effective for four-star stuff", then that's such a niche application that it doesn't feel necessary to adjust multiple powersets' effects just for that one situation. Solo, duo, or a small team, end drain can be hugely impactful. I'd worry about making it TOO effective, if you're trying to scale it up so that it's really impactful for a full team as well.

Or applying for a job. "Okay, your appointment is at 3:30, come up to HR and we'll do your interview." "Sure, how do I get to HR?" "Hoo-boy. Okay, so, on the first floor, you want to take a left, circle around to a large room that has four hallways out of it. Take the hallway on the right, then take a right when it hits a T-junction. There'll be an elevator at the end of the hall." "Okay, that's fine, then where?" "So now you'll be on the second floor. Head down the hallway until it hits another T-junction, and take a left. Follow that one until it hits another T, and take a right. Then up a flight of stairs, past the break room, down a flight of stairs, and around a corner. There'll be another elevator. Take that to the third floor." "Wait, why not just take the first elevator straight to the third floor...?" "That's not how elevators work in Paragon. So anyway, now you're on the third floor. Head around the corner to the left, and into a huge open room. You might have to jump over a railing when you first come into it, unless you want to walk down the stairs and across the room, then back up a flight of stairs and over to the stairwell that's just to the right of the door you came in through. Once you get through that doorway, head down the hall, down another flight of stairs, and take a right. HR is the last door on the right." "...this sounds really insane." "Yeah, wait 'til you have to talk to Fiscal. They're on the 6th floor..." "Eek."

There are a few things here and there that still portray the game as being in the 2000's instead of the 2020's. Mr. G's rogue arc, for instance, mentions that "you're trending on some popular blogs" when you're doing your big power play. Not "social media", it specially says blogs. 🙂

I have an elec/elec defender that I play as a sapper, as I've got both some end drain bonuses in several of her attacks (especially short circuit) as well as the incarnate ability that adds end drain to all her attacks. The difference when I play her vs groups of mobs vs other characters is pretty substantial. I can dive into a giant spawn of mobs even on +4/8 as a solo defender, rip them all down to zero endurance, and just stand there picking them off as they stare helplessly at me, occasionally throwing a weak attack. So yeah, end drain isn't as instantly obvious as slapping a hold or a stun or a knockdown on an enemy, but once you get them down to zero, they're basically a paper tiger that you can kill at your leisure.