Frostweaver

It's an extra pool choice you are FORCED to take in order to do your JOB effectively. It's like Dominators being pathetically weak unless they pick up hasten. if there was a short-range 'earth meld' power attached to granite that appears like arcane teleport's, That would be one thing. But no one should be forced into taking a particular pool power in order to play your role effectively. No one else is so forced into losing a choice like that.

Stone Armor needs more cowbell.

I said I wasn't a coder, not that I was never neck-deep in the industry. Being an outsider watching from the inside grants you an interestingly wide-angle perspective. And The rule holds true in the military as much as it does the private sector.

I was gonna say. Stone armor had 1 trick. 1 godlike trick. But with the advent of IO sets, That trick just isn't unique enough to be worth it's downsides anymore. The set needs serious help, or at LEAST it needs it's damage penalty removed. It's trick just isn't special enough to warrant it anymore. Or it needs a better trick.

First off, I was a lifer deck ape in the amphib fleet. No one lies about being a Boatswain's mate in the amphib fleet. 😛 They all pretend to be seals or airborne or something glamorous or brilliant, like decoding specialists or submarine dive officers. Not people who get shot at and seldom get to shoot back. The only medals we usually get are time-in-service and lots and lots of purple hearts. And no, in my experience, a 'team' is one person doing almost all of the work, a second person doing all the asset acquisition, organization and distribution (That means art, music, level designs, launchers, etc), and then 4-5 wortless klingons pretending to be the 'idea men' while simply abusing the worker and organizer into giving them credit. if you are a hind-end team you might have 2-3 guys actually doing real work, but then you have 20+ 'community organizer' types paid to put toys around their desk and plonk away at a keyboard pretending to work. oh, and a 'corporate liason' type idea man who's paid to make promises to the parent company that the coders cannot keep, and threaten the coders and change their minds on the 'project direction' every time the real workers finally get something almost working. It doesn't take a team to get big things done. It takes 1 seriously motivated man. He doesn't hire a 'team', he finds other similarly motivated men.

Well, Bio has a LOT of clickies to interrupt momentum. You probably get used to it. I am running a TW/will specificially to minimize interrupt clickies, so the idea of opening with a two second attack in order to quickly get into ideal damage state is very appealing.

is the momentum-building animation for all attacks the same time, or do different attacks have different momentum-building times? I'd very much like to know if one momentum-builder is faster than the rest.

There's a reason polling is ridiculously unreliable. I would provide examples, but we do not discuss politics on these boards 🙂

To be fair, I too would appreciate an option button for certain sound effects to disable or change them. It could, in fact, be part of the launcher options rather than part of the game core. Have you considered asking the tequila team ? Unlike Jubakumbi, I consider asking someone that loves coh but is not a coder to learn the complexities of coding to write their own file modification software to be similarly unreasonable. I myself spent my best years for learning to be a coder doing inconsequential things like fighting wars. It's a bit late for me to learn coding now, and it does not suit me.

My main was an ice/fire also. Named, obviously, Frostweaver. With the defense debuff resistance, as well as being able to slot some decent resistance, ice is much stronger now than it was then. Combustion is, of course, the great tanker equalizer.... and with a little color-shifting fire can sure look a lot like Freezing mist with much cooler-looking swords. I am not sure why they ever added the swords, though... except that when fire and ice were created, fire was the only way for an efreeti to get a scimitar.

rerolling as a widow? hehehehe.

You claimed that a small minority hate the sounds, I claim that over half the players. We are both drawing our statistics from the same orifice, although in my case, I recall a poll from like 11 years back on the boards about PB sound effects getting changed, 71% said 'yes', and 29% said "No I love it", although, to be fair, with a self-selecting testing methodology such as that it is impossible to determine how many simply don't care. And forcing people to delve into file management and alter the basic structure of the game, not to mention invalidating image checking and repeat it after every single patch, is utterly unreasonable, especially if, as has been mentioned repeatedly, they suffer physically from such effects. Attempts to physically or emotionally Blackmail the Homecoming staff are similarly unreasonable. They have zero reason to care about whether you, personally, continue playing. Whether you are offended is also irrelevant, which was the entire point.

Thanks flea, I have been trying out the build. It's definitely great as an offender build. I think I am going to multi-build, as expensive as it is. The only change I made was slotting in a chance to buildup in soul storm, and then adding in a steadfast KB to dark embrace. After I realized that soul storm has, quite possibly, the absolutely coolest hold animation in the whole game, I am happy to lead off with it and it's recharge time almost guarantees that both sould drain and thunderous get an extra 60%? damage when they go off. It's kinda nice to actually brush the damage cap for defender 🙂

the PB sfx have been giving me and hundreds of other players migraines since day 1. There was a 16 page forum post about how terrible they were back on live. this sort of change is exactly why we appreciate the HC devs, they have 'fixed' more game problems in the last two months than the live devs did in 5 years. Over half the player base despises the PB sound effects. If you want to leave a free-to-play MMO because of it, don't let the door hit you.

Thanks for providing a perfect reason to delete my martial dominator. I miss the 'bounce' messages. too.

Why do you say that? You know, with a tanker's hit points, many of Regen's 'click to not die' buttons are sort of less important. regen/ would become almost disgusting... think 4k HP, 300 hp/sec heal, insane MOG. That would not preclude something like fiery melee dishing out some serious damage at ALL. Or were you just being simple about me putting in /regen instead of regen/?

radiation melee has a secondary taunt aura that is a pretty decent aggro magnet in irradiated ground, although spine's quills are considerably better because they can actually slot generic Taunt IO's Fire melee for tankers has combust, a power no other pure melee toon gets, which can taunt hugely if you 5 slot it with a set and use the 6th slot for taunt enhancement, no one will even notice you are willpower. Fire melee also has, by far, some of the best aoe of any tanker set. 1 slotted taunt combust at 50+5 will taunt an average of 1000 points with overlapping gauntlet auras for 20 seconds, and at 50 you will likely be able to add another 1000 points of taunt every 8 seconds or so. Most blasters with their MUCH lower aggro multiplier cannot even come close to overcoming that level of taunt if they give you the chance to apply it. Added to rise to the challenge, you might bnot be able to steal aggro from the ice tanker, but the brutes and scrappers won't be taking it away from you (a fact that Brutes absolutely hate). You won't have to add provoke with combustion. Outside of that, well, willpower is known to have aggro issues.

Sort of, but the initial effect is considered to originate from the stalker, not the pseudo pet. This is what I believe happens, but I have not read the code myself so I can not be certain: If you drop an ice patch in the middle of a group of mobs, it immediately checks for to-hit on it's built-in knockdown. This to-hit chance is static and not affected by any other accuracy or to-hit chance, exactly like a proc effect. It is actually pretty low, but ice patch pulses quite quickly. If that initial tohit chance succeeds, then whatever mob is hit with the KD is assumed to be attacked by the stalker, and hide will immediately drop. If none of the mobs are hit on the first 'pulse', it is like missing with an AS, and following pulses should not affect your hide at all, as it is the area effect pseudopet pulsing the knockdown, not the stalker. this is where it gets weird though... I am not sure if ice patch is actually affected by your interface.... It's possible your interface effect could cause a second proc effect originating from the stalker themselves. but I have noticed much the same effect from when a stealthed ice controller drops ice slick, and arrow's oil slick. sometimes it simply aggroes in the first tick... but if you watch the foes bounce, you can see that the time between the very first pulse and succeeding pulses is actually very short, even though the chance of any individual target getting hit are also very low. (Maybe 5%?) That actually begs the question... will slotting stalker chance for hide actually proc when things flop? or only when you trigger the power?

Now I want a /regen tanker 😛

taunt and the T1 attack are pretty much it. Rad armor is one of the best armors in the game, but unlike some of the less powerful armors you pay for it in power picks. some people skip shatter because of the long animation and the near uselessness of 'everything in a line' melee aoe's, but it is still a good attack... just slightly less good than the rest (and way better than pools) and Meltdown is about it for skipping radiation armor... and again, the combination is incredibly powerful, and meltdown itself is also extremely good comparatively for a T9... but post incarnates, I find myself seldom using it, it's rare enough that I get better use out of slotting another LOTG mule. awesome is awesome, but when you are already pushing resistance and defense caps, it just doesn't offer much that you don't already have in your set. Prior to incarnates though, I wouldn't skip ANYTHING in Rad armor.... you want skippable powers? Pick suckier sets 🙂 The problem is that even Mace's tier 1, Bash, is a pretty darned good attack. they REALLY buffed the heck out of the set.

well, it kinda cancels out offensive adaptation's resistance penalty, which could be nice, especially if you are farming, since being swamped with enemies is sort of a thing. who really wants to fool around with orange insp?

what do you want the build to be good at? general content? farming? Incarnate stuff? MSR herding? Each requires a different build to be outstanding. fire farming being the pickiest and most expensive, general content/incarnate being the most difficult to balance.

When there are a lot of special effects flying around, I often find myself 'losing' my mouse pointer. Is there a way to alter the graphic so it's like a giant pulsing crosshair or something so I can keep track of it under the worst graphical conditions?

Oh, I get it completely. I have an old rotator cuff injury that keeps me from playing nearly as much as I like (usually an hour a night, max) but now you have me interested... A bindfile, with everything set up, and a build designed to maximize farming. two-button farming as a preset. all you do is create the build, load the bindfile, put the buttons in the correct place, and viola! instant (almost) top-tier fire farmer. Heck, it could even have binds for instructions on how to use it most effectively. Still, if it's possible to leverage savage over and above current builds, I REALLY want to see if it works out. Grr. one project at a time. I am a huge fan of finding out how to overcome 'conventional wisdom', but I guess people like me are where 'conventional wisdom' comes from in the first place.

Yeah, I guess us old farts have to have some edge over the twitch-happy twenty year olds. I sorta see now why your builds are set up the way they are, since some advantages, such as Rad's explosion damage, can be extremely difficult to exploit effectively in a bind-heavy setup, to the point where it would actually slow you down over using cages/ball, considering how necessary fusion timing is to getting the extra damage. Although I am trying to figure out a way to combine a build and binds together to give maximum rad throughput, I suspect you could wring about another 10-20% speed out of it. At first I didn't 'get it' because my clear speeds as a rad/fire already exceeded spines/fire and I was using that as my basis for comparison, but now, I am seriously considering trying to see what is possible with nested and chain binds to take it a step further. Of course, that also means I might have to go ahead and pl a spine/fire and apply the same tricks in order to get a baseline 😛