WumpusRat

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.

I would absolutely love having a shapeshift travel power that turned you into a bird. Only problem is I don't think there are any actual animated birds in the game, outside of the Beast Mastery attack powers, and they're not really fully animated I don't think. So that might be tough to do.

It's odd. I pretty much pug every single TF I do, since I don't have a stable group of people I play with. I've had maybe one bad TF run in the last two months. A few "wtf?" moments here and there, but nothing that stands out as "ugh, this is awful". Maybe my tolerance is just higher, or I've just been having good luck. I've run a ton of Posi-1/2's in the last few weeks, both leading them as well as hopping into pugs. The only one that was a bit bumpy was one where a farmer (who had never done a TF before) came along, and was baffled at how difficult it was compared to farming, and the fight with the last boss inside the dam got away from us a bit as someone got pushed back close enough to another spawn to aggro them. But everyone just laughed it off, we picked ourselves up, brushed off, and pounded Doc Vahz into the dirt like a tent-peg.

I tend to focus on one character at a time, so if I need to get something done for them, I just go do it. Whether it's badges, finishing content, a zone, respeccing, etc. My normal method of play of late is to "finish" a character (get all relevant accolades, unlock all incarnate slots, get most of them filled with at least tier-1 to tier-3's, get their full build together including all ATOs, uniques, rares, etc, all TFs done) before moving on to another one. It also lets me narrow down what I might find as "unfun" in a character as they get higher up. I've restarted one of my concepts twice now, and I might be restarting it again, as it doesn't quite feel right as it gets up to 50.

I haven't tested any of the others, but the necromancy attacks do NOT need to actually hit in order to summon a specter. Just fire them off on cooldown (assuming you have the endurance) until it pops up a specter, then go back to doing other stuff.

I just started a new seismic/stone armor sentinel the other day, as an "Earth Shaman". Doodled up a quickie build on test to try her out at high-level, and hoo boy, she's tanky as hell. Super fast damage output, as well, with seismic's built-in haste. Decided to go with knockout blow from the leviathan pool, and she's hitting for nearly 600 with it, which is pretty nice. Only real weakness is that her psi resist is only barely into the double digits, though her psi defense is around 40%. So she can avoid a lot of it, but if it does hit her, it hits like a truck.

Since stone armor is a type-based defense set rather than positional, putting two slots in terra firma is a great way to get a little bit more defense out of it. Two-part rectified reticle gives you 1.88% more smash/lethal defense, in addition to the +perception of the one IO part, so it's quite nice.

I see a new player occasionally on Everlasting. Usually the moment they pipe up with questions and saying "I'm new..." you get a ton of people swarming on them offering advice, helpful hints, suggestions on what to do, and most of all welcoming them to the server and hoping they have fun. 🙂

Any character that I have that has a 'left hand primary' powerset I just assume is left handed. Makes it easy to justify.