Rare power sets that used to be popular.

[Uun]

45 minutes ago, Heraclea said:

It remains the case that the set needs serious help, especially, as you note, in the 40+ game.  There has also been a longstanding desire to make Regen a tanker primary.  I rolled an experimental /Regen brute about a month and a half ago to see if such a character could be made sturdy enough to tank for teams.  With HEAVY investment in set bonuses and incarnates geared only towards survival, I was able to get the character to a place where a Willpower character would be on generic enhancements.  Instant death is a major problem.  So are click heals that don't work immediately when clicked.  It will not work as a tanker primary in its current state, 

I've only played it on a scrapper, but I'm not surprised it doesn't work on a tanker. When faced with enough damage it gets overwhelmed, nor does it withstand alpha strikes well. 

[Gobbledygook]

It once was capable of absorbing an alpha...

But now it's not.

[Menelruin]

IMO as soon as they figure out how to do "negative knockback," FF needs to have a crush/gather power that jams enemies within a certain radius onto a single point, making it easy to herd them for other folks to blast.  They also need a sort of "Force Cage" power where you have a circle radius at an area, and any enemy who tries to cross it gets knocked back towards the middle.  Like a ring of mini versions of the Earthquake pseudopet.

[Yoru-hime]

Stalkers in general, but ninjas in particular. It felt like the Ninja Blade/Ninjutsu or SR combo used to be everywhere. They still show up, but it doesn't feel like half of all Stalkers you see anymore.

[Chris24601]

9 minutes ago, Menelruin said:

IMO as soon as they figure out how to do "negative knockback," FF needs to have a crush/gather power that jams enemies within a certain radius onto a single point, making it easy to herd them for other folks to blast.  They also need a sort of "Force Cage" power where you have a circle radius at an area, and any enemy who tries to cross it gets knocked back towards the middle.  Like a ring of mini versions of the Earthquake pseudopet.

If that’s not possible, I wouldn’t mind seeing an immobilize or even hold put into the Force Field set; If they have the control to let allies shoot out if their bubbles, they should be able to make them one-way in the other direction (instead of using intangible). Throw in massive knockback protection on the target while you’re at it so people with a FF on the team don’t need to sweat knockback.

 

I dunno if there’s an animation for pounding on cell door or similar, but have the held target use that animation while held would be quite funny.

 

While I don’t like to ignore the Cottage Rule; in this case I am for stretching it to the absolute limit. Turn the force bolt and repulsion bomb into actual damage dealers (maybe with some “dazed” debuffs to recharge and damage reflecting the extra potence of the knockback), replace the intangible with a hold as outlined above, add stacking absorb to all the bubbles (“ablative force field”)

[Solarverse]

22 hours ago, Uun said:

I still see plenty of rads. Granted the debuffs become less valuable when you get to the end game. While the -res is nice, the real positive is -regen. I believe it still has the biggest regen debuff (-500%) in the game. The heal has always been meh.  

I dont have the numbers on hand, I'm currently at work; but I think Dark has the same -regen and it stacks with the Dark Heal.

[Solarverse]

44 minutes ago, Menelruin said:

IMO as soon as they figure out how to do "negative knockback," FF needs to have a crush/gather power that jams enemies within a certain radius onto a single point, making it easy to herd them for other folks to blast.  They also need a sort of "Force Cage" power where you have a circle radius at an area, and any enemy who tries to cross it gets knocked back towards the middle.  Like a ring of mini versions of the Earthquake pseudopet.

Oh my, I would quickly make a bubbler if they did that!

[Without_Pause]

29 minutes ago, Yoru-hime said:

Stalkers in general, but ninjas in particular. It felt like the Ninja Blade/Ninjutsu or SR combo used to be everywhere. They still show up, but it doesn't feel like half of all Stalkers you see anymore.

Likely due to theme more than anything. At least Regen had a moment of glory. *ahem*

[Doc_Scorpion]

22 hours ago, Uun said:

I still see plenty of rads. Granted the debuffs become less valuable when you get to the end game.

Both my earth/rad troller and rad/rad defender have been very popular on low and mid level teams.

More than once my rad/rad joining a team had been greeted with "Yay!  A rad!".  Of the moron who once said "but he's not a healer", the less said the better.  (Other than, once we got into a mission his general inability to play showed why he thought he needed a healer.)

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Uun said:

When faced with enough damage it gets overwhelmed, nor does it withstand alpha strikes well. 

 

1 hour ago, Gobbledygook said:

It once was capable of absorbing an alpha...

But now it's not.

Funny.  My /regen scrapper solos and absorbs and survives alphas on a regular basis.  (And did so even before I IO'ed out his regen.)

[Heraclea]

11 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

Likely due to theme more than anything. At least Regen had a moment of glory. *ahem*

I have a double ninja stalker, so I went out of my way to break the mold on concept.   Gave her a French name and French themed costumes.   She continues my character 'Mlle. Marianne' from Victory.

 

One thing I have always found curious.  In the Sentinel Ninja Mastery epic pool, the Caltrops power is named 'Tashibishi' or something similar, which is apparently incorrect in Japanese (I wouldn't know).  But in Ninjutsu as a stalker secondary, the Caltrops power is named 'Caltrops'. 

[Uun]

1 hour ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Funny.  My /regen scrapper solos and absorbs and survives alphas on a regular basis.  (And did so even before I IO'ed out his regen.)

Not saying they can't do it, but there's a tipping point. If the damage doesn't surpass your regen rate, you can live forever. Once it does...

[Doc_Scorpion]

55 minutes ago, Uun said:

Not saying they can't do it, but there's a tipping point. If the damage doesn't surpass your regen rate, you can live forever. Once it does...

The trick of course is to play intelligently - and stay within your limits if you want to live forever.  Unless you've spent a stuff-ton of money, every AT and build has limits.  (And often, even then.)

My playstyle generally doesn't run to regularly spending stuff-tons of money.

[Myrmidon]

For me, it has to be Controllers that don’t immediately spam their AoE Immobilize the moment the team makes contact. Those are about a 1 to 20 ratio with the ones that do. 
 

Now, I have to say, it does make Tanker ranged cones extremely fun to use on strung out groups.

[Ironblade]

2 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

The trick of course is to play intelligently - and stay within your limits if you want to live forever.  Unless you've spent a stuff-ton of money, every AT and build has limits.  (And often, even then.)

My playstyle generally doesn't run to regularly spending stuff-tons of money.

My trick for the indestructible regen scrapper is simple and cheap.  At any given time, my inspiration tray is at least 2/3 medium purples.  I don't even buy them.  I just combine drops since I don't really need acc, dmg or end insps.

[Menelruin]

The problem with the cottage rule is that, pretty much by definition, it makes FF pointless at Endgame.  The entire theme of FF is to buff defense....and by the time Incarnates roll around, it's pretty easy to cap anyway.

[Apparition]

58 minutes ago, Menelruin said:

The problem with the cottage rule is that, pretty much by definition, it makes FF pointless at Endgame.  The entire theme of FF is to buff defense....and by the time Incarnates roll around, it's pretty easy to cap anyway.

 

Nailed it in one.  Some power sets are so broken, that the only way to repair them for this Issue 26 world is to break the cottage rule.  Force Field is one of the prime examples.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 3/8/2020 at 12:52 PM, carroto said:

I do occasionally see a Bots/FF Mastermind.  Had one on a mid-level team not that long ago and the +def was a huge boon.  I'd move around to stay inside the big bubble.

It's still a helpful set when you're leveling up, but most forum-goers are, I think, in the "I have my 50 purpled out and all Incarnate powers T4ed" group, not to mention min/maxingl.  Which isn't a knock against them!

[Gobbledygook]

7 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

 

Funny.  My /regen scrapper solos and absorbs and survives alphas on a regular basis.  (And did so even before I IO'ed out his regen.)

 

I freely admit to not playing the set more than a handful of times since it was murdered by the original Devs. I did attempt a few times, even getting into the mid 30's once. It became to much of a chore for me to play.

It did give me an opportunity to play the other secondary sets though. I fell in love with /SR, /WP, and of course /INV.

 

One of the issues I have with current regen is the fact that it needs Shadow Meld and MoG (which while the buffs were nice, they weren't in tune with what regen as a set is supposed to do, which is regenerate) to bring it up to par to other secondaries just killed it for me.

 

 

 

Who knows, maybe I'll roll one up on the beta server and see how it does at 50.

[biostem]

6 hours ago, Uun said:

Not saying they can't do it, but there's a tipping point. If the damage doesn't surpass your regen rate, you can live forever. Once it does...

At least with alpha strikes, part of the problem is how enemies in the same group tend to all recognize you and attack in perfect synchronization;  If there was a little variability to simulate differences in reaction time, things may go better...

[Redlynne]

23 minutes ago, biostem said:

At least with alpha strikes, part of the problem is how enemies in the same group tend to all recognize you and attack in perfect synchronization;  If there was a little variability to simulate differences in reaction time, things may go better...

There was a time when I used Phase Shift out of the Concealment Pool as both a "healing" power (via regeneration) and as an Alpha Absorber power, in effect "forcing" piles of $Targets to waste their alpha attacks on me while phase shifted.  Kind of hard to do that these days with the recharge time on Phase Shift sitting at 180s base, but it was an option for getting past a withering simultaneous alpha strike back in the day.

[Heraclea]

1 hour ago, Redlynne said:

There was a time when I used Phase Shift out of the Concealment Pool as both a "healing" power (via regeneration) and as an Alpha Absorber power, in effect "forcing" piles of $Targets to waste their alpha attacks on me while phase shifted.  Kind of hard to do that these days with the recharge time on Phase Shift sitting at 180s base, but it was an option for getting past a withering simultaneous alpha strike back in the day.

My regen scrapper uses invisibility and Caltrops for a similar effect.  Caltropped mobs run away very slowly and don't attack as much.  This helps spread it out a bit.  I did not bother taking fighting pool on this character; Tough and Weave would be lipstick on a pig.  She is basically a melee blaster with mex protection and solid stealth. 

[srmalloy]

8 hours ago, Uun said:

Not saying they can't do it, but there's a tipping point. If the damage doesn't surpass your regen rate, you can live forever. Once it does...

The original pre-IO, pre-rework Regen was all about this -- learning where the balance was to be able to jump into a big spawn of mobs and whittle their incoming damage down below your healing rate before you ran out of hit points. Once you could use IO set bonuses to fill in the places where it was inconvenient to build around getting enough Defense and Resistance to shift that point significantly, it made it possible to get the same survival with 'sloppier' builds that weren't based around squeezing the power pools until they screamed to get everything you could out of them for your survival.

 

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

It's still a helpful set when you're leveling up, but most forum-goers are, I think, in the "I have my 50 purpled out and all Incarnate powers T4ed" group, not to mention min/maxingl.  Which isn't a knock against them!

And that's one of the things that annoys me about most of the builds that get posted in the forums -- you see the fully twinked-out character with their two Superior ATO sets slotted, purple sets everywhere they'll fit, all the Incarnate slots opened and maxed-out, and how this all works together to make the character a juggernaut... and nothing about how they got there to give you an idea of how to go about following that build up through the levels. Some people don't have their own Fire/Spines Brute to farm tens of millions of influence to be able to pay for all of these enhancements, and if you don't have all the right T4 Incarnate powers and the purples and ATOs you're suffering from crippling End costs, or have an ugly hole in some specific defense or resistance type, and no suggestions about how to make this work, other than the obvious one of "level a build that works, accumulate several billion influence and cap your Incarnate components, and buy everything at once".

 

2 hours ago, biostem said:

At least with alpha strikes, part of the problem is how enemies in the same group tend to all recognize you and attack in perfect synchronization;  If there was a little variability to simulate differences in reaction time, things may go better...

It's not directly related to alpha strikes, but the "attack in perfect synchronization" thing has been acutely painful for me several times, literally. In the "Cure the Lost" mission, you can pick a lieutenant to cure in the middle of a crowd of minions, and if you're wearing headphones or earphones, if the surrounding minions all pull out shotguns and unload on the cured civilian, the *BLAM* from all the shotguns going off at once hurts. And I keep my sound levels turned down.

[Doc_Scorpion]

13 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

And that's one of the things that annoys me about most of the builds that get posted in the forums -- you see the fully twinked-out character with their two Superior ATO sets slotted, purple sets everywhere they'll fit, all the Incarnate slots opened and maxed-out, and how this all works together to make the character a juggernaut... and nothing about how they got there to give you an idea of how to go about following that build up through the levels.

So.  Much.  This.  There's a lot of theorycrafted builds and a few actual tested builds - but either way, they're endgame builds.  Getting advice on what powers to take when and what's skippable while leveling...  that can be like pulling teeth.  Heck, getting advice on how the play a not-top drawer-endgame build can be difficult.
 

19 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Some people don't have their own Fire/Spines Brute to farm tens of millions of influence to be able to pay for all of these enhancements

Some people don't want to farm, they just want to play the darned game rather than run farms so you can run iTrials.

[The Bobby Llama]

13 hours ago, Menelruin said:

IMO as soon as they figure out how to do "negative knockback," FF needs to have a crush/gather power that jams enemies within a certain radius onto a single point, making it easy to herd them for other folks to blast.  They also need a sort of "Force Cage" power where you have a circle radius at an area, and any enemy who tries to cross it gets knocked back towards the middle.  Like a ring of mini versions of the Earthquake pseudopet.

Perhaps instead of negative knockback, it would be easier rig up some kind of negative repel on a pseudopet instead.  A knockdown could still be added on top of the negative repel to get the enemies off their feet as well.

 

The Force Cage idea is fun, too, but it would be tricky to prevent speedy enemies like werewolves from slipping through between pulses.