Zolgar

Sura, my point was that Stone Armor at bare minimum needs a buff without Granite for two reasons: One: Granite, at least with the debuffs it includes, should not have to be an "on all the time" power for the set to not suck. Two, as I have said like 3 times already: A power set shouldn't be horrible to play until the capstone power because "the capstone is so good." As it stands right now, the 1-32/38 journey on a Stone Armor character is basically a tax on getting Granite and being able to do what a tank/brute is supposed to be able to do from the start (and most, if not all, other armor sets can do from the start). This is why I am disregarding Granite for the purpose of the numeric comparisons, because I am trying to get Stone Armor buffed to the point that it plays fine while leveling, and a Stone Armor character can build to not live in Granite at all times, without seriously weakening themselves.

Naw, 6 powers kinda suck. Mudpots and Earths Embrace are decent powers. 🙂

Still viable. Slightly lower influence efficiency than AE, higher XP efficiency. As for good times, I'm not sure, my farmer is not optimized to farm (it's a tertiary purpose for her), and I spend too much time chatting to really get a good measure of how long it takes me to clear the Council map.

You want to get super fancy, you set up rotating binds for banter. >.> It's especially a good option for something like Taunt, put a system in place where are you move or use powers it constantly loads a new bind file that changes what you say when you use Taunt, so that you don't end up with a never ending stream of: $target I've seen tougher marshmallows. (because that shit gets older than a box of stale peeps)

Hm, typically the game considers anything within quotations one arg. Try in the chat menu one, changing the line: Menu "Chat menu" To just: Menu Chat and /bind shift+enter popmenu chat The game may not like two word menu names. I shall need to experiment. The joy of systems in the game that don't behave QUITE the way other system do. 🙂

You know, everyone keeps talking about Granite, how tough stone is when you get Granite... Let's pretend that Granite is perfectly fine as is (it's not, but lets pretend that)- Leveling Stone to get to Granite is a painful experience. Stone armor, pre-Granite, is one of the worst armor sets in the game, if not the worst. It's toggles provide less benefit than comparable sets (check the numbers for Ice armor and Stone armor individual powers, you will find that not only do the toggles in Ice offer more than just +def, they also offer more def than Stone's comparable toggles). It's mez protection hobbles you in exchange for a pathetic amount of regen. It has rather significant endurance costs, but no means of recovering endurance. THIS is my problem. Granite is not my problem. My problem is the fact that when leveling Stone Armor you are at a significant disadvantage to pretty much any other armor set in the game. Stone armor, on a whole, is a heavily outdated set that doesn't hold up to the current state of the game, even with Granite, but with Granite it's passable. It should at least be brought up to be passable before Granite, too.

Lusca is one of the most dangerous of the open-world giant monster spawns, if not the most dangerous. She is also, beyond any doubt, the most time consuming to kill. My experience with Lusca is that a decent team of 8 will take 10-15 minutes to kill her. On the other hand, many of the other giant monsters, I can solo in less than 5 minutes with my scrapper (who cannot currently solo Lusca at all), a decent team of 8 will take them down in less than 2 minutes. Yet Lusca's reward is the same as all the other open world giant monsters, less than Adamastor once a day. She takes long enough to defeat that it can often be hard getting a group together to take her down if you want the badge, because she's really not worth the time it takes to kill her. I would like to see her rewards be brought up to put her closer to equal to the work she is to defeat compared to the other giant monsters. My suggestion would be to add reward merits for the defeat of her legs. This would bring her reward more in line in terms of merits to time/effort required with the other GMs, and it would also prevent people from jumping in late and still getting the big reward. She takes 3-4x as long to kill as most other giant monsters, other giant monsters are worth 6 merits, so she should be worth 18-24, which might seem high, but she's not really farmable. We could implement something like with Adamastor, you get a larger bonus for defeating her once a day. Something like: 2 merits per leg, 8 for her head, If you've defeated her in the last 20 hours, those rewards are halved. If that's not possible though, even just adding 1 merit to each leg, making her worth 14 merits instead of 6, would make going after her worth while.

I ain't talking out my ass either mate. I've played several stoners to and at 50. I am actively leveling a stoner right now. In the current meta, a stone brute or tank is a joke unless they have a kin on the team with them. Stone NEEDS to be fixed, especially pre-granite, because, and I cannot stress this enough: A power set should not be so unpleasant to play that you literally hate it more and more every time you play it because it cannot do anything it is supposed to, just because it's capstone ability is "good" (not amazing, not great, just good). Leveling a stone brute is painful. Even doing taskforces I love, I am HATING playing this character.

I have an opinion, one that is shared by many: Pre-Granite, Stone armor is the worst armor set in the game. Some will argue that Regen is worse, and while I can see their points I do disagree. Now, this is the part where someone tells me “But Granite is amazing so Stone is fine as is.” to which, I say: First, Granite is only ‘decent’ in the current state of the game. Second, 31 (or 37) levels of being absolute garbage should not need to be suffered through to be able to do what you’re supposed to do from level 1. Literally no other set in the game is so painful to play before you get your capstone. Now, this is all subjective, let’s look at things objectively. Stone is an old set, so we’ll compare it to the old sets. It wouldn’t be fair to compare it to Shield or Bio, since those sets are modern and have a higher power curve. For the first set of comparisons, let’s look at SOs only. Now, the survival numbers I am using here will indicate the full suite of the primary powers, except the T9, for a tank. I am starting with SOs only because the game is “supposed to be” balanced to SOs (I disagree with this sentiment, but I will entertain the notion for the moment). Stone tank, with Tough, Weave and Maneuvers, all toggles active. Each toggle has 3 SOs of the applicable type (res/def) and 2 end redux, also has mudpots with 2 end redux, Stamina is 3 slotted, physical perfection has 2 end mod/1 heal (for the record, this build has 18 slots left to apply to their attack powers): Defense: Smashing/Lethal: 36.3% Fire/Cold: 11.3% Energy/Negative: 36.3% Psionic: 50.3 Positionals: 11.3% Resists: Smashing: 39% Lethal: 39% Fire: 39% Cold: 39% Energy: 0 Negative: 0 Toxic: 0 Psionic: 0 Health/end: Regen: 375% (29 hp/sec without Earth’s Embrace, 46 with) Max HP: 100% without, 159% with. EE has approximately a 65% uptime, slightly greater if I burn a power pick on Hasten. Recovery: 2.83/sec Consumed: 1.84/sec It’s also worth noting that this build has a run speed below 10mph with 2 slotted Swift, and cannot jump over obstacles, so was forced to take Teleport to have any form of mobility at all- WITHOUT Granite. I will also mention that no other original tanker set has that sort of penalty on their mez protection. Would you like to know how often my leveling stone brute gets mezed because I had to drop rooted to chase the team (because teleport through winding sewers is super inefficient) and I don’t quite get it toggled back on before I hit the fight? Now, what set shall I compare it to? Invuln? Ice? Fire? Dark? My choice is Ice, because Ice is a very similar set to Stone- Defense based with a bit of resists baked in, not a lot of regen baked in, and the only self heal being a Dull Pain style power. So for Ice, I used a basically identical build, I tossed Combat Jumping in to the mix, slotting is pretty much the same. Fun fact! This build has 20 slots to play with. Because this build has permanent uptime on Energy Absorption, I am using the numbers for 1 target hit. Defense: Smashing/Lethal: 44.8% Fire/Cold: 18.2% Energy/Negative: 44.8% Psionic: 15.2% Positionals: 15.2% Resists: Smashing: 23.4% Lethal: 23.4% Fire: 32% Cold: 90% Energy: 0 Negative: 0 Toxic: 0 Psionic: 0 Health/end: Regen: 180% (14 hp/sec without Hoarfrost, 22 with) Max HP: 100% without, 159% with. HF has approximately a 65% uptime, slightly greater if I burn a power pick on Hasten. Recovery: 2.83/sec (plus every 35 seconds, we’ll get endurance back from Energy Absorption) Consumed: 1.6/sec With only one run speed SO in Swift, this build runs 21 mph, and can jump over obstacles. So, let’s compare those numbers for a moment: Defense: Stone clearly loses on defense. Everything but psi is lower for Stone, the softcapped psi defense for stone is nice, I will admit. Resist: Technically, Ice wins here. Ice has combined higher resists than Stone. Though, I think I would actually give it to Stone because Smashing, Lethal, and Fire are more common than Ice. Effective damage mitigation per damage type (vs. even level minions without +to-hit bonuses): Smashing/Lethal: Stone 91.6%, Cold 96.2% Fire: Stone 76.4%, Cold 78.4% Cold: Stone 76.4%, Cold 96.8% Energy/Neg: Stone: 86.3%, Cold: 94.8% Psi: Stone 95%, Cold 65.2% The only place where the effective mitigation of Stone beats that of Ice is in Psionic damage. While it’s true that Stone regenerates more HP per second, the totals regen from either set it not really enough at level 50 to be considered anything but downtime reduction. Ice can eke a bit more effective mitigation out from everything but psi by hitting more than 1 foe from Energy Absorption. Ice consumes less endurance and has a means of endurance recovery baked in. So Ice has better stats almost across the board, a powerful endurance recovery tool, and no movement penalties, and gains the added survival of Chilling Embrace, slowing down the incoming attacks and reducing their damage. And Ice is honestly not even really a top-tier set (it’s better than people give it credit for, I actually really like the set. Then again, I really like stone too even though it’s so bad). “But Zolgar what about IO sets and incarnate powers and…” Yeah, those are things, but in very few cases do they bring one set above a comparable set that was better than it without. I don’t feel like taking the time to do two IO builds out and breaking down all the numbers a second time. “But Zolgar, Granite is a toggle god-mode!” Sure. Ish, at least. Slotted with 3/3 def/res, Granite with weave and maneuvers will put you to about 43% def all but Psi, and 78% res all but psi (Stone Skin brings you to 90% smashing/lethal), which is great. A 12.6 mph tun speed without rooted, a whopping 1.4 with! While you’re at it, take -65% global recharge and -30% global damage because screw you that’s why. In a purely SO world, that’s good, but as I just acknowledged above, this isn’t a purely SO world. In the IO/Incarnate world, we can easily flip that to softcapped/near rescapped all (but psi) for Granite. In the IO/Incarnate world, you can build appreciable amounts of defense and resist in to a lot of sets, and what you lack in those, you will make up for in regeneration, self heal tricks, or DPS because you’re attacking faster and hitting harder. And you can actually move. Stone, over all, is the last artifact of the original ideaology of armor sets: Toggles were meant to be one or another, not all running at once. Mez protection was meant to come at a price. (These two factors are also why the clicky mez protection of Super Reflexes was so good. … but that is another post) ED and the GDN hadn’t struck the world yet. IOs and Incarnates were not even a concept yet. In that world, Stone was undeniably the supreme leader of tanking, but it came at a heavy price. In this world, the level of durability you get out of Stone armor, compared to other sets, comes at too high of a price to make the set all that viable. So how do we fix that? This, I don’t claim to know as much. I can examine and crunch numbers for days, but to find a way to adjust Stone to make it balanced in the current environment, that’s a lot harder. I might suggest something along the lines of: Rock Armor: Increase the defense to bring it inline with Frozen Armor from Ice, add Smashing/Lethal resist to it. Stone Skin: Add a small tick of Absorb. Earth’s Embrace: Leave it alone, dull pain powers are good. Rooted: Switch places with Mudpots (the mez protection comes too late in the set, IMO), remove the run speed penalty, allow jumping with a significant height debuff, leave it mutually exclusive with movement powers, increase the regen by about 50%. Mudpots: Lower the endurance cost, remove the Immobilize effect (in all my years playing Stoners, I never noticed things being immobilized by this power), add a defense debuff. Brimstone Armor: Add a minor fire damage proc to all attacks (think of it like baby’s first Reactive Interface). Crystal Armor: Bare minimum increase the defense to bring it inline with Glacial Armor from ice. Minerals: Add an Endurance discount. Granite: If it would be possible what I would love to see with Granite is its core stats unchanged (except removing the inability to jump), but have each of the other armor toggles reduce the penalties for Granite, so that if you have all four of the other armors, Granite’s only penalty is not being able to run very fast or jump very high. I would also like to see the runspeed debuff reduced a little bit. The reason for that posed change to Granite is, one of the problems with Stone armor right now is it’s basically “get to Granite, forget half of the rest of the set exists.” so you usually end up respeccing out of them. These changes over all, would allow a Stoner outside of Granite to be more survivable and less hindered or reliant upon teleport, while making Granite worth using for the big fights. You can still play Stone the old way if you want, and the penalties for Granite make up for the fact that you have 3 or 4 (depending on brute or tank) extra power picks.

Reasonable and simple. I approve of more half way decent attack options in pools. Hm, I am not sure. I would seldom, if ever, take this if it used the Ninja Run animation - I would only support this power existing if you could choose your animation. Ninja Run looks awesome for some, barely less stupid than Naruto running for others. I do also feel that the ninja run animation does not flow well with the rest of the set. As above I would want to see the options of none/beast/ninja for this. Also, I think that just being enhanceable would make this power good enough to include in the set, making it enhanceable and having higher base numbers than Ninja Run would basically say flat out "you are an absolute utter idiot if you choose Super Speed or Super Jump over this power." Fire? I'm in. Definitely on board with a "natural fireball" power. I'm not sold on this one for a couple of reasons: 1) We already have quite a few powers, including one pool power, that are charge attacks. 2) I'm not sure I feel that a melee T5 fits with the rest of the pool? 3) I feel as though trying to make a line-damage charge attack would be ... problematic based on the mechanics of City of Heroes. My suggestion would be bump Molotovs to the T5 slot, and in the T4 slot: Leg chains: Short range single target attack, deals light smashing damage, slows the target, and has chances to both knock down and immobilize the target. Animation would be throwing a bolo-like chain at the target.

Quick note about the "Target_custom_next" command, if you're using it to pick out enemies, put an alive tag in there. So it might be "target_custom_next enemy alive Surgeon" or the like. And a couple other useful keybinds or macros: For the radiation defender/controller/corruptor/masterminds out there- /bind e "powexec_toggle_off "Radiation Infection"$$powexec_toggle_off "Enervating Field"" (replace e as you like) - auto drops your toggles since they now stay up on a dead body. /macro Caltrops "powexec_location target Caltrops" (you can replace Caltrops with any power that is targeted the same way) activates the chosen power, centered on your current target. /macro Charge "powexec_location self "Shield Charge"" Like above, only centers the power in yourself, useful for the likes of Shield Charge because it turns it in to a PBAoE. /bind e "powexec_location target teleport" - for the stone tanks and brutes out there, teleport directly to your target. /bind r "powexec_location camera:max teleport" hit r, automatically teleport as far out as the camera can see, straight out.

With Giant monster scaling anyone who is at or higher than the "hidden" level of the monster does damage to it at the level of the Giant Monster. A level 50 would hit at level 7, and take damage at lvl 50. But they would have a redunculous amount of powers and defenses for a "level 7" monster and could likely solo it with a halfway decent build. Not only could we solo it, but there is a segment of us who WOULD solo it, because soloing GMs is a hobby. :)

You are, in fact, getting the benefit from all 3. You will get 10% of your endurance on average once every 13.33 seconds, give or take.

Rad/Fire is right up there with Spines/Fire. They are so comparable that you will not get a clear answer as to which is better. Rad/Bio brutes farm well too. Titan/Bio scrappers farm well.

Is it wrong that I immediately made a character with this name on every server? Yes, unless you are actively going to play that character on every server :p

Wow, nerd! That's actually super cool to know though.

Bold choice man, but as long as you enjoy it!

I always felt Cap was a tank. Captain America is the one who will stand in the front lines, taking a beating, so people can escape. He is one who will, without a moments hesitation, put himself between an enemy and basically anyone else. He is one who does not believe in the phrases 'collateral damage' and 'acceptable losses'. He is one who will without hesitation, or any thought of self preservation, sacrifice himself to save others. Cap is a tank.

Oh no! I hope more don't feel that way. There were so many good entries and the judges really enjoyed it! So I'm certain this will happen again in the near future. Looking forward to reading more Zolgar! I hope you don't mistake what I said as any sort of bitterness. :) There's a certain flavor found among most of the placed/honorable mentions, and that is to be expected because something like a bio competition is highly subjective. In my case, I could have given myself a better chance by submitting a different bio, but not knowing what sort of preference the judges would have I had to throw something at the wall and hope it would stick, just like everyone else did. And the rigged comment was entirely a joke.

I clearly chose the wrong one to enter. >.> Congrats to the winners. The competition was TOTALLY rigged, rigged I say! :p

So, personally, I'm not big on Deep Drama plots in RP as I tend to find them hyper cliche, and typically so scripted that outside of a small number of key players, anyone else involved is really just a spectator. The flipside of the heavily scripted though is of course the fact that when a plot is developed there is an intention of some form of character growth coming out of it, you don't get much growth when someone unexpectedly comes along and is able to just solve the problem outright. I tend to like casual RP teams, I enjoy idle IC banter, I enjoy playing my heroes when they're relaxing in their limited downtime. I like them making friends, I like them finding romance, and heartbreak. I like to explore what it is to try to be human when you're superhuman (or not human at all). I like to have a character just struck by the beauty of the sunrise over the ocean, the beauty and tragedy contained in the destruction in Boomtown and Faultline, the simple joy of skipping a stone across the lake in Perez Park... In short. Life. I like to roleplay life.

Over on Everlasting at least: I have literally never seen someone say another person's costume sucked. There is very little "you're doing it wrong" to go around either, that mostly tends to happen when someone joins a TF expecting one type of run and getting another ("You didn't say this was/n't a speed ITF!!"), and the occasional mostly good natured bickering about the quality of power sets. As for "Kill stealing"... Ugh I hate seeing that term used in City of Heroes. What happens in City is not kill stealing. True kill stealing is something that can only happen in MMOs where the credit for a kill goes to the person who got the killing blow, kill stealing is waiting until a player has a creature almost dead and swooping in to hit it with a powerful attack to claim the killing blow, and thus credit for the kill. It also sometimes is used to refer to disregarding the queue that has formed for an open-world boss, and just attacking it as soon as it spawns. Neither of these are issues in City of Heroes, as anyone who was involved in the fight gets credit for the kill. Yes, if someone steps in to a fight to assist, it costs you a portion of the xp/inf and that's a little annoying, it is not a seriously detrimental thing. Berating someone for stepping in to a fight is worse for the community than people stepping in to the fight do. The most you should ever do is say "Thanks for the assist, but in the future you should really check to see if people need help before you jump in." - Bloody hell, I don't even berate people when they come "help" when I am soloing a GM.

I have always thought it would be cool if there were badges for a large number of GM kills. I don't know if the game would have the capability of counting just "giant monsters" for a badge, if it could, a badge chain for like 10/100/500 or something would be awesome. If it can't count just "giant monsters" for a badge, what about an accolade for defeating all the giant monsters that exist (or perhaps all the non event specific ones?). I would also humbly submit the badge name 'Titan Hunter' - in no way shape or form am I suggesting it because I have a character named Titan Hunter, nope. (that's a lie and you know it) Shut up, voice in my head!

I mean, I hate people trying to assign the CoV archetypes "equivalents" to the CoH archetypes. It seems to me that around the time they gave up on the list I gave, they also gave up on the idea that archetypes were equal, and more went with the CoV archetypes being more solo friendly and a little less stuck in one role than CoH ATs. A tank is agro management. A scrapper is DPS. A blaster is DPS/light crowd control A controller is crowd control/support. A defender is support/light DPS A brute is agro management/DPS. A stalker at launch was Boss killer (at launch they weren't very good for DPS due to their best damage options typically being to fade in and out of combat for as many crits as they could get, before the ATOs and the stalker changes that put them much closer to scrappers.) A corruptor is DPS/Support A dominator is crowd control/DPS A Mastermind is alpha soak/DPS/Support There was really no equivalency, yet people constantly tried to shoehorn one in. To say Brutes are tanks is true, but to say they are scrappers is true too. To say dominators are controllers is true, but it is also true to say they are blasters or scrappers. Each CoV archetype is capable of being specced to fill multiple roles fairly well (except launch stalkers which were one-trick ponies), where are CoH archetypes were more about filling one role especially well.

Reserved for future use.