WumpusRat
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Posts posted by WumpusRat
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10 hours ago, mistagoat said:
However, it feels odd that a reef is mobile and sentient enough to follow me. I'm sure it's too late to change anything but making it something like a sea turtle or a big crab or a Gary would make much more sense to me.
I dunno how different it is than a walking houseplant, a gravitational singularity, coalesced energy in a vaguely humanoid shape, or any number of other things that just happen to follow you around. 🙂
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I've mostly been trying it on masterminds, since it gives a decent variety of things (melee, ranged, mixed) to see how it performs within a "mini group" so to speak.
So far it's worked VERY well for melee oriented pets, as you can tend to keep everything in the pool and keep chain-knocking them down with whitecap now that it's got a much lower recharge.
For ranged pets it's not AS solid as some of the mobs will charge out of the pools and they'll split up, if it's a large spawn (for instance, some of the Talons spawns in the DA arcs come in 2-3 spawn 'super-packs', and have 15-20 mobs clustered together if you're running on x8).
Overall, it's a very solid set, but for masterminds I'd much prefer the heal to be a pbaoe instead of a cone.
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After playing with it for a bit, I definitely think Soothing Wave could stand being a pbaoe instead of a cone. Since almost every other power in the set is either radiating from you, from an enemy, a placeable, or putting you into the midst of melee (Whitecap), making the heal radiate outwards from you makes a lot more sense than having it as a cone. Having to constantly jump back and forth as a support set makes it a bit clunky, particularly as a mastermind with melee pets. You want to be in the mix with your pets so you can use Whitecap for debuffing and mitigation via knockdown, and having to look around to figure out where your pets are, then back up to line up the cone, then jump back into melee feels awkward.
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16 hours ago, Ukase said:
Thanks - but all that did was show a very long list of powers that Fiery Embrace would have some affect on. ("Powers bearing tag "FieryEmbrace")
Doesn't answer the question of what's going on for those 20s.
Ultimately, it likely doesn't matter. I'm still going to take and use the power. Just trying to stretch my brain and get smarter.Once you trigger Fiery Embrace, for those 20 seconds every time you attack it will proc bonus "Fiery Embrace" damage on the target. It's an extra hit for (depending on the attack) considerable damage. I think on my fire/fire brute it was doing around +140 damage with greater fire sword.
It basically just adds a fire proc to all your attacks for 20s.
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I have flight as the travel power and probably 90% of my characters, so generally I just point myself in the direction of a mission that's really far off, hit auto-run (well, auto-fly) and load up a video or something on one of my other monitors. Or I start doodling around with a build in mids on the other monitor.
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32 minutes ago, Xandyr said:
Power of the Depths
Roughly +1200 Max HP (INSANE for pets!)
Bear in mind that the hp cap for pets is MUCH lower than it is for players.
On my robotics/marine test build, my pets have:
Tier-1: 575 (863 with PotD)
Tier-2: 768 (1153 with PotD)
Tier-3: 963 (1445 with PotD)
The pets aren't going to get +1200 hp. They'll reach cap long before that. The numbers above are the hp caps for the pets.
As far as damage caps go, I BELIEVE they have +400% like most other things? I'm not 100% sure though.
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So far Marine Affinity feels a lot like Nature but ... buffed.
My thoughts so far playing it on a Mastermind:
Soothing Wave is pretty much a standard cone heal, and the -enemy damage is pretty minor (at least on a MM), so it's not a big deal.
Shoal Rush is a decent -def power, and the -stealth is kind of fun too to kick Arachnos banes and widows out of stealth.
Toroidal Bubble ... feels a bit too strong. The resists are about the same as Wild Growth from Nature, but it also gives end/recovery debuff resist, recovery, end restore, and +jump height? Seems a little bit bloated considering the power is basically perma right out of the box.
Whitecap is essentially Spring Attack, but with a -resist debuff tacked onto it. Fairly solid power overall.
Tide Pool says it's a toggle but it's just a placeable field like Tar Patch or other things. I haven't gotten to really see the bonus damage from enemy defeats in detail yet, since all the pets firing stuff around made it a bit tough to really pinpoint, but it feels like it would be very powerful in the hands of a Defender on a team with a bunch of melees.
Brine having both a -resist and a -max hp debuff seems pretty strong, but the long cooldown feels like it balances it out. Even if the duration is basically perma on a single target.
Shifting Tides is odd in that it needs an initial target rather than just being something radiating from the caster. Interesting buff overall.
Wellspring is a bit surprising in that it follows you around. I wasn't expecting that. Makes it a LOT more powerful than I expected.
Power of the Depths is ... very powerful. In the hands of a Mastermind, VERY powerful. Bordering on too powerful. The fact that you can make it nearly perma without too much trouble (with just a thrown together build mine is about 10s off perma) and will boost the max health of your pets (!) as well, it's a very potent ability for a Mastermind. The +range on the pets is quite nice, as well. My tier-3 pet has 1500 hp with the buff up (compared to the 963 that a standard tier-3 pet has), which makes it FAR more durable. It makes the +regen much more valuable, too.
Overall, it feels like a VERY potent set. Will definitely need some fine tuning as time goes on. Right now it basically feels like a semi-mirror of Nature, in that it does a lot of similar things, but the tier-9 buff is defensive rather than offensive.
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I'll hop onto the test server tonight when I get home from work and play around with it. Though I'm still holding out the faint hope that the MM sets that weren't updated will finally get their updates at some point. And maybe someday a new MM primary...
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A couple I've made recently because they tickled my fancy:
Mary Malicious -- a "streamer gone bad" who got a bunch of heroes injured with one of her pranks and got tossed in jail (not the Zig, since she wasn't a super, just normal jail). While in prison, she and some other inmates came up with the idea of live-streaming crimes, and so broke out of prison and started filming themselves committing more and more serious criminal activities. At this point she dreams of taking down the Freedom Phalanx live on camera.
The Abdominator -- a fitness instructor who is way, WAY into his own hype. And you will be too, since he has the power of Abdominal Charisma(tm) (mind control). He is here to pump *clap* you up. Lift: "Do you even lift, bro?" Fear: "Gaze upon my rippling 8-pack and despair!" Confusion: "Look at my muscles. Now look at your own. Now look at me again. I'm on a horse."
Harlequin Romance -- a socialite who the Carnies tried to recruit, but despite her flighty nature and privileged upbringing, had enough willpower to overwhelm the mind control coming from the mask. Though she won't take it off. Now she goes around spreading her own ideas of "total adoration" to anyone who will listen. And if they won't, she'll MAKE them listen. "Love me or perish!"
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All depends on the character and how much I group, really.
Some characters I tend to solo with a lot more, so they're a bit slower than those that I do lots of TFs with.
On AVERAGE it's probably around 30-50 hours to hit 50th.
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9 hours ago, Ukase said:
Or - simply take this approach with those who would presume to lecture you on how to manage your power:
"Sorry - but I'm not sorry. Part of my fun is watching these npcs fly across the room. I'm not going to waste a slot just so you aren't bothered."The only problem with this approach is that it can backfire on you spectacularly.
"Yeah, and MY fun is locking enemies in a Detention Field and watching them be unable to do anything."
"And mine is dropping Dimensional Shift onto packs of mobs because it's amusing to see their attacks fire off and hit nothing."
"Mine's slapping Black Hole onto a group of mobs and spamming /taunt and /laugh at them while they futilely glare at me."
So my question would be, would any of those things annoy you while you're on a team doing missions? Even "defeat all" missions, where you have to stand around waiting for those enemies to pop out of the 30-second long invulnerability bubbles? What happens if the person with it KEEPS doing it?
Because I've had it happen, and it's REALLY annoying after the first couple times.
Some people don't like knockback. Others don't like people randomly going afk for 5m every other mission. Others want to speed-run while others want to do defeat-all even on maps that don't require it.
TACTICAL knockback is all well and good. Punting enemies into a wall that's a step away? That's fun. Hover-blasting and knocking them to the ground? Awesome, I'm all for it. But constantly yeeting them 20 feet away so as a meleer I have to chase after them, and it kills my aoe damage? Yeah, I'mma be grumpy after a bit.
The trick is to find people who like the same things you do. If a group doesn't like knockback, and you argue that "my fun is X, tough luck if you don't like it", it's a rather selfish path to take, and I certainly wouldn't bat an eye if the group leader punted someone who made that argument, particularly if I'm playing a melee character.
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7 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:
It's just about as bad as Fold Space, which also confounds AoE players and tends to make each crowd you attack all about you.
The people with hair-trigger Fold Space buttons can be incredibly annoying when I'm playing a brute or scrapper with aoes. I'll jump into a pack of mobs, start to do my aoe stuff to tear them apart, and suddenly all the mobs are 20 feet away because someone decided to Fold them somewhere else. After the first couple times I just stopped leading the way and just waited for them to pull mobs, and then dumped my aoe stuff. Makes it a bit more tedious (for me at least), but at least I'm not wasting my powers as much.
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12 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:
I actually agree with the OP. I can't think of any other group in the game that has... absolutely no significant explanation or backstory, no matter how corny, convoluted or comicky. Khelds are just... there ya go. Go. Hunt. Squid Around.
No connection to any other element in the game. Cross-dimensional passerby.
Sure, most of us could write a killer backstory... but it would be entirely without common anchors or grounding.
I find them weird to play anyway, even with a good UI.
A very frequently-run TF (Moonfire) is all about Kheldians, and how she's getting you to help fight against the Nictus, how the Council is forcibly merging Nictus with their soldiers, etc.
Where do you think all the Council Nictus guys come from?
As far as "no connection to any other element in the game", again, that's untrue. See above.
Bt even then, I have a bunch of adventurers who got plane-shifted from their D&D/Pathfinder homeworld and ended up in Paragon. They literally have zero "connection" to Earth or anything else. But they don't need to.
One of the characters I have (that I need to get around leveling) is a warshade who is a "serial possessor". The nictus just grabs the nearest person, uses them until they die, then grabs another one and keeps going. My plan is to shift through the various costume slots to have each one be a new "body" it's possessing.
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I do like Category-5 from Storm Blast. Calling down a huge whirlwind and pounding rain on an area is fun.
If we're counting combos, then a Storm/Storm character is awesome fun.
Storm Cell + Cat-5 + Lightning Storm + Tornado for just sheer "End of the World Nature's Wrath" stuff.
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On 6/20/2024 at 11:50 PM, GM Crumpet said:
Willpower is great until you get hit by -regen and suddenly your HP tanks. I've had some hairy moments on my WP tank a few times
That's why on my willpower brute I picked up Unrelenting. For the rare occasions where something messes with my regen, I can turn that on and heal 100hp/sec for 30s.
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I pretty much only do story-arcs and TFs when I play. I don't farm, I don't do PI +4/8 maps, I just run around getting contacts and doing arcs.
It's why most of my characters end up with like 750-1000 merits by the time they're 50, and can use that to fund their builds.
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Maybe I've just gotten lucky, but I've noticed that pretty much every TF I've done on Everlasting over the years has, even if things go sideways and we get tons of wipes, just soldiered on through and didn't start blaming everyone. Sometimes a big wipe just made everyone laugh, and we got back up, brushed ourselves off, and went back at it with the resounding "screw you, round two you're going down!"
We had a Synapse the other day that had 37 defeats. It took a long time for anyone to come help with Babbage, and we were getting pummeled. Dragging him away just far enough for someone to rez and jump back in, and another person would drop. Rinse, repeat. It was epic. I think that fight alone was like 15 of our defeats.
40 minutes ago, Digirium said:And therein the ruination of many TF/SFs -- XP greed that destroys all fun.
Sometimes this happens simply because the leader isn't high enough level, as well. A group that I do TFs with a couple weeks ago started a Synapse, and we were all 16th level. The mobs spawn at 20/21 even if you have it set to +0, so everything was +4 and +5 to us. And even if you level, you're "set" for the TF, so you'll be 16th for the entire thing. It's an odd bit of code.
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20 hours ago, Random Axis said:
My point is that saying "I want pet X" is a suggestion that will never go anywhere since all you've done is come up with the names of three powers in a set. If you don't know what the rest of the set should have, why should the devs have to do that homework for you? Taking an existing set and kitbashing it into a new one makes it easier for the suggester to include all nine powers and suggests how to implement it since the three attacks would already have animations and such.
You're not "taking an existing set and kitbashing it into a new one" by suggesting a ranged blast set for a MM primary.
The pets are the primary function of a MM set. The ranged attacks are secondary.
It astounds me that you think it's somehow more work to add three attacks to a MM primary that can fit the theme of it than to come up with various pets that serve as a cohesive theme. Yeah, I didn't plot out all nine powers in a set. Mostly because the chance of MM primaries being added AT ALL is slim to none, if we're being perfectly honest. The devs don't seem to have any real interest in adding new MM primaries. They barely have any interest in updating the three sets that didn't get overhauled with their MM pass they did nearly two years ago at this point.
But given that the main function of a MM is to have pets, suggesting possible themed groups of them may have some tiny chance of sparking interest in one of the devs. Saying "yeah, make a MM set around electrical blast" doesn't do anything, since you'd be dumping two thirds of the set anyway, and most of the powers that make a blast set unique are NOT the two tier-1 single-target attacks and the weak aoe.
If I were going to put together an actual suggestion for a MM set, I'd do it in the suggestions forum, not the "it would be neat if we could someday have something like this" thread in general.
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10 hours ago, Ukase said:
Don't attune purples or PvP IOs because they are attuned right out of the box. You can respec, or you can use unslotters, take out the attuned and replace with level 50 versions of the same enhancement.
I always attune PvP IOs. Mostly because they start at 10th level, and if I have a 49th level one, I can't slot it into a low level character. So I'll attune it and put it back in storage, so that way any of my lowbies can grab it and use it early on.
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5 hours ago, Random Axis said:
Not that all the blanks need to be filled, but I think it shows there's a lot of room to pick a set; take ranged powers X, Y, and Z; add three pets, their enhance powers, and a T9. Boom. New MM Primary.
MM primaries are more about the pets than the MM's personal attacks.
Not only that, but the Dual Pistol and Beam Rifle sets were created after the MM sets were established.
So the devs basically took the pistol attacks from Thugs and created a whole set based around it.
Same with Beam Rifle.
And honestly, I'd much rather the Ninja personal attacks be shuriken than bows. None of the ninjas use a bow. But they do all have shuriken.
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3 hours ago, Riverdusk said:
Most common example, slot two level 50 recharges in hasten and boost them each to +5 and you max out hasten with only 2 slots needed instead of 3. You just saved a slot to use elsewhere.
While this is true, if you're trying to shave off the last few seconds of Hasten's recharge to make it perma, the extra slot is actually more beneficial, assuming you don't desperately need that slot elsewhere.
Two 50+5 recharges ends up with 95.x% recharge for the power.
Three 50th level recharges ends up with 99.x% recharge.
That 4% may not be worth it if you don't particularly care about getting it from, say, 121 to 119, but it CAN make a difference in squeaking down to the perma-hasten point.
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On 6/8/2024 at 5:37 AM, Marshal_General said:
At a supposedly 10% drop rate with 100 times chance for a drop, I should have averaged 10 drops. in my understanding of statistics.
Even with being unlucky, I still should have gotten at least one.
"How could I have failed this often with a 10% chance?!"
95% to hit and missing 20-30% of the time consistently for months laughs in rng.
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4 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:
No.
Players still need to provide their own enhancements, there's no easy mode for that. Because their own ability to get rewards is so limited (the only available source of rewards is critters in PVP zones) the expectation is that those characters will receive influence and enhancements from other characters that are PVE enabled.
Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of "removing the time required to level up a new character to participate in PvP", since you'd have to have a 50th level with copious cash/recipes/etc on hand already, meaning it's really just an option for well-established people with hundreds of millions of inf lying around.
Ah well. I don't use it anyway, but it does seem a little silly to require people to "bring their own enhancements" for it. At least give them free SOs or something.
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I want more MM primaries. They have the fewest in the entire game, with only 7 to choose from.
Some stuff that would fit the "non-world-specific" theme of MMs while using in-game assets:
Elementals -- fire imps for tier-1, lightning and ice elemental for tier-2, earth elemental for tier-3
Spirits -- coalesced spirits for tier-1, formed impressions for tier-2, enraged spectre for tier-3 (thees are all First Ward mob types)
Mythical -- will o wisps for tier-1, tuatha champions for tier-2, redcap fiend for tier-3
If you start using Paragon/RI-specific enemy groups for pets, there would be dozens of potential set options.
Longbow, Arachnos, Family, Sky Raiders, Hellions, Skulls, Outcasts, Trolls, Warriors, Freakshow, etc etc etc.
How do you folks build? Do you make a 50++ build in mids as a starting point or some variation of a leveling build?
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by WumpusRat
Generally the way I build a character is about as follows:
1) Come up with a concept for the character, theme, and powersets
2) Doodle around with the build in mids, initially just throwing together a build and seeing where the numbers pan out, then trying to hit certain benchmarks
3) Get the build to the point that I'm happy with it on paper, then go to the test server and put it together to try out
4) Fight random mobs in the portal corps parking lot, then do a 0/8 mission against Council, Carnies, and Malta to see how it fares before activating any incarnate abilities, then try it out at +2 or +3 using incarnate stuff
5) Take the build to DA and do a couple of Heather's missions (particularly the second one, since the first spawn in that mission has a tendency to be a 'double spawn' and has upwards of 20 mobs packed into a single fight)
6) Adjust as needed
7) If I'm happy with it, take it to live and start leveling up. Doesn't matter if it doesn't play as well at low/mid-levels as I know it's going to pan out in the late-game
But #1 is the most important. Without a concept that I think will be fun, I just won't make the character, even if gameplay wise it would be statistically really powerful. And some mathematically weaker concepts are some of my favorite characters just because of how fun they are to play, and the personality I created for them.