On the new CoT and council......the good and bad so far.

[DrunkFlux]

So I'm trying to solo them on 8x+3, reason being that if forming a 54 PI team, often there are lowbies, if your the only incarnate and not able to 100% solo things, then the team is going to struggle very very hard.

 

So with this in mind, I decided to so far try the mobs on 8x+3 for one main reason:  Some mobs are 53, some are 54 due to some getting 1 level higher than the setting(barring 54 streight).  So far;

 

Melee toons struggled against CoT due to way, way to much -tohit aura spam, I ran into a situation on one of my scrappers where I had to just flat out abandon the mission, it was 100% undoable.  They'd stack to much -tohit and I had no effective counter to it.  My stalker could partially counter it, but even then I frequently had to pull back, and this was only one run.  Also I had noticed confuse/terrorize are used in spades and many sets provide no protection from that, which horribly damages one of the main draws to playing melee classes/sentinels, protection from CC.  My ice/martial/ice blaster was able to deal with them largely due to simply destroying them at a distance thus negating the huge to-hit aura.  My staff/bio/mu scrapper in fact had the worst luck; a mob composing almost exclusively of death mages and ghosts, due to just sheer luck.  She couldn't do any damage, at, all, due to the sheer amount of to-hit debuffs.  Even judgement couldn't hit 'any' of them.

Meanwhile, my ice/martial/ice blaster couldn't deal with the council to terribly well.  This was due to a combination of factors, the big one being that dark eclipse archons have WAY to much health, and also almost ALWAYS turn into dark warwolves which are also very, very tanky.  Even though she leans heavily towards survivability she struggled and died TWICE, which to me is an F.  My water/time/fire blaster meanwhile died once on the first run, but managed to avoid dying the second run after switching to diamagnetic and spamming the hell out of AoEs to stack it asap on the mobs.  Even then I had a few close calls such as two big hits in a row both rolling identical 4%'s.  She even handled 3 mobs consecutively but the slower ST kill speed that blasters generally have compared to a certain other class, it was only due to having to escort a very slow npc and lower ST issues).  After a third mission I concluded my water/time/fire blaster was in a better direction and it leads me to consider a respec fore the ice/martial/ice to an ice/martial/soul blaster(since neg energy damage is so rare in IOs *shrugs*).

 

My DB/Bio/Energy Stalker actually stomped the council super easy and even cleared the map faster, purely due to the ST being higher ST against bosses allowing her to dispatch the dark eclipse archons/dark warwolfs so much faster that the lower AoE(Still had some) actually didn't matter, I was able to clear the mobs just fast enough and clear the bosses faster that my clear time was far, far higher.  This wasn't perfect as she also had some difficulty with circle of thorns and to-hit debuff spam, but I could always teleport out of the auras and patches quickly.

 

I'll continue periodicly testing characters against 8x+3 council/CoT to see how things are effected.  So far;

 

There seems to be no limit on -tohit aura spam for the circle of thorns.  This isn't cool for melee at all and was a main problem players had with the original positron TF.  God help a pure melee team.  This in fact actually lines into fake difficulty; best you can hope for is keeping moving away and use the ST you have from your ancillery pool, god help you if your main set has no ranged attack which is 90% of them for a clear reason.
Council aren't to bad but the dark eclipse archons(which always turn into dark warwolves) are so tanky(due to 90% of the time turning into dark warwolves) that high ST builds out-pace high AoE builds, unless they have a lot of both.  The non-vampire eclipse galaxies seem far, far more interesting now, though, and are actually a lot of fun with teleports and the reses.  So for team gameplay they are nice, solo the dark warwolves are more annoying attack sponges that might sometimes hit you absurdedly hard.  This was a problem for the blasters, not so much for the stalker.

 

Both groups are much harder than arachnos and carnies.

 

Honest opinion;  With my tier of F being far to easy to A and S being very fun, and SS+ being cheating and very frustrating with no fun:
 

CoT: Overtuned, easily, melee simply cannot counter 10+ to-hit auras when a mob is unlucky enough to have a lot of ghosts spammed in it.  Combined with confuse and terrorize having no cc protection for many sets, this puts them in SS+, cheater level.  Tone the ghosts to-hit spam back, or relegate that kind of spam to TF's only.  This is NOT fun for radio missions, not, even remotely.  I also noticed the other mages, ruin/madness/agony seemed surprisingly rare so far.  Since it seems to just spam dark to-hit debuffs and nothing but, this makes them feel like a poorly designed AE mob with to-hit anchors spammed.  So thus, SS+ cheater level.

Council: Far more balanced, but dark eclipse archons seem to be the most common bosses at times, and always turn into dark warwolves.  When every single mob seems to have one 90% of the time and then 95% of the time turn into dark warwolves, it gets repetitive fast.  I very rarely encountered the more interesting eclipse galaxies and there lt/boss counterparts, I ultimately felt council to be annoying in spots with some missed potential, but it might be my rotten luck.  A tier.  Nice roadblocks but my luck turned fighting them into a slog on my blasters, and my stalker managed to out-pace the blasters inspite far less AoE firepower simply due to superior ST being the big winner in this.

 

Things this has done in this update:  I won't be building blasters as much but I also won't be fighting circle of thorns solo, if I do ever form teams i won't be ever picking circle of thorns until they tone back the to-hit spam.

Edit: I Am going to make some clarification, these conclusions were made regarding solo play, for two reasons; Some of us enjoy being able to solo things, and also 53 and 54 teams often only the leader is 50+1 and I've not always seen top builds, and I wanted to see how my top-end builds performed and also tested one scrapper even with a medium-build.  I am very glad i'm not the only one who feels this way about the new mobs.

54 with only 50+1 is effectively one player carrying the team, and they may be fine with it as they want the company, also many people join 54 on non 50s because yes, they are trying to level lowbies, and may not have a few months to level that toon in the long run, or simply not the time to grind forever.  And 54 PI is actually faster than AE due to even the non 50s participating.  When a mob is powerful enough, 54 teams simply move onto other mobs and ignore the more dangerous ones.  Ironicly, I find even malta to be easier than the new CoT, and the new council are just meat-bags in teamplay, simply taking longer to clear.

 

54 normal mode ITF is still faster yet than 54 PI, and honestly i wouldn't ever want the normal mode ITF to get the changes to it that hard mode introduces.

Edited March 5 by DrunkFlux
Added some notes per how the discussion went here.

[Psyonico]

So, long and short, you're expecting to be able to solo something that is designed to be difficult (but doable) on an 8 man team?

[Parabola]

The tohit debuff thing is why I take focused accuracy on just about every melee toon. I figured out a long time ago that it's the debuffs that are the cause of 90% of high level deaths and I build accordingly. It's not a new problem for cot though. Prior to the upgrade they would constantly spawn death mages who run a -tohit aura. Getting into a fistfight with four of them wasn't uncommon and it was only winnable with focused accuracy.

[DrunkFlux]

7 hours ago, Psyonico said:

So, long and short, you're expecting to be able to solo something that is designed to be difficult (but doable) on an 8 man team?

I was gauging how well my toons could do so I could know how well I could carry a team or not with them and whether things were fair or not, an largely sharing my thoughts on it so far.  I already adjusted the build of the ice blaster to account for the dark damage attacks, and plan to gauge and perfect over time :).  Experimentation phases and all that.

But its also a mentality; if I was to join a 54 and I needed to switch to a 50+1(I have had bad teams with weak incarnates even before this update, collosally weak in fact) I wanted to make sure I was bringing a toon up to the challenge.  Something worthy of difficult combat.  Fixing flawed builds is always something I'm doing anyways.  To be unable to solo them is also to be unable to carry a struggling team.  A standard I go by on all my builds, be it support, tank, dps ect.  I already have my widow but she makes the rest of the team unstoppable, this experiment was for my non widow toons.

 

36 minutes ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Good!  I think the changes were meant to remove easy farming/sleeping your way to 50.

I suspect the same, I mean I saw teams when leveling toons myself who were captained by people who were far from capable of handling even the council back then, let alone say, CoT today.  

 

4 hours ago, Parabola said:

The tohit debuff thing is why I take focused accuracy on just about every melee toon. I figured out a long time ago that it's the debuffs that are the cause of 90% of high level deaths and I build accordingly. It's not a new problem for cot though. Prior to the upgrade they would constantly spawn death mages who run a -tohit aura. Getting into a fistfight with four of them wasn't uncommon and it was only winnable with focused accuracy.

I admit I usually just split them a bit and then cut them down after, rather than simply trying to "tank spank" them, in fact I prefer mobile builds specifically to deal with patches and ensure i'm always in the best position for cone attacks ect.  Maybe i'll actually take a second look at focused accuracy, since I realize they lowered the end cost of it considerably(at least I thought in a patch note?  Mids says otherwise, unless it was even more and i'm remembering incorrectly).  Hard to though when snipes can do so much damage that its a huge loss to take focused accuracy for a few mobs.  But it does make me think of how I could improve on the stalker who excelled at the council already to punish the CoT even further on her.

[dtjunkie]

5 hours ago, Parabola said:

The tohit debuff thing is why I take focused accuracy on just about every melee toon.

 

This is the way. At this range? With focused accuracy? Even when I miss I can't miss.

 

[Sovera]

10 hours ago, DrunkFlux said:

Melee toons struggled against CoT due to way, way to much -tohit aura spam, I ran into a situation on one of my scrappers where I had to just flat out abandon the mission, it was 100% undoable.  They'd stack to much -tohit and I had no effective counter to it.

 

I'm finally vindicated for always taking Focused Accuracy!

 

... not for the accuracy boost but rather for the large -ToHit debuff resistance.

 

One of my last Fire Armor runs had me going against Vampyr who simply shut me down until I kited them to the point the debuff wore off. But this is a recurring trend against -ToHit (even early level CoT) so FA keeps finding its way as a one slot wonder to my builds.

 

Of course it's hard to condone FA when players want their Moonbeam max damage option.

 

Edited February 29 by Sovera

[Marshal_General]

Yeah the BP in DA also have a lot of -tohit. That is where I test most of my test builds. I realized I needed FA really quick.

[ZemX]

1 hour ago, Sovera said:

I'm finally vindicated for always taking Focused Accuracy!

 

I didn't need a CoT update for that.  Old CoT would easily turn my tank into not much more than a Taunt bot.  Or Tsoo Sorcerers.  Or Cabal Storm Witches.  Or BP Storm Shamans.  Or Master Illusionists's Fluffy Pets.  Or....

 

It's still a choice.  If you want to be as self-sufficient as the OP seems to, then you take it.  If you can rely on teammates to overcome enemies you are particularly vulnerable to, then that works too.

[Sovera]

On 2/29/2024 at 1:58 PM, ZemX said:

 

I didn't need a CoT update for that.  Old CoT would easily turn my tank into not much more than a Taunt bot.  Or Tsoo Sorcerers.  Or Cabal Storm Witches.  Or BP Storm Shamans.  Or Master Illusionists's Fluffy Pets.  Or....

 

It's still a choice.  If you want to be as self-sufficient as the OP seems to, then you take it.  If you can rely on teammates to overcome enemies you are particularly vulnerable to, then that works too.

 

Same. Tsoo Sorcerers were so kind as to turn off Hurricane so that I could hit them, otherwise it would not happen. Good guy Tsoo Sorcerer!

Edited March 7 by Sovera

[Judasace]

People need to start taking Leadership/tactics. Stacked tactics would solve the -to hit, the confuse and the terrorize. I take Assault/Maneuvers/tactics on almost every character, because there's no reason not to. Unfortunately a lot of people follow build guides meant for farming or soloing +4/8.

 

People will say "builds are tight" but no, they're not. Builds were tight when you HAD to use up 3 powers to get stamina and two of those powers were only marginally useful. With inherent fitness, there's no reason for people not to replace those 3 powers with the leadership pool...again, unless they're building for farming/soloing/speedrunning.

 

So yeah, if you've got a "team" of farmers/soloers/speedrunners you're going to have problems. If even half the team has made an effort to put team powers into their build, it will be much less of a problem.

 

Personally I wish they'd give every enemy group a slight makeover that made fitting team powers into your build more useful.

[Carnifax]

3 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

So I'm trying to solo them on 8x+3, reason being that if forming a 54 PI team, often there are lowbies, if your the only incarnate and not able to 100% solo things, then the team is going to struggle very very hard.

Then you drop the diff surely? If your team is mostly made up of pre-twenties why are you running +3/4x8? Just drop the notch and pull them out of the Purple Patch range. As a lowbie player who has joined 54 PI teams not being able to contribute and watching someone solo em isn't a lot of fun personally (takes me back to the bad old TankHerding days). I quite like the fact we have things like Sorcerers / Paragon Protectors which the Control folk can nullify, Blasters who can mow down the chaff and Stalkers & Scrappers who can delete bosses. 

 

I've found both groups to be fine on teams. Solo my Ice / Stone Stalker can be murdered by the new CoT if I'm not paying attention. The Tank will find NuCouncil a slog. But with 8 people on a PuG team I've not noticed a huge difference.

 

You'll nearly always have a kryptonite on characters. My Fire tank will deflate against lots of Psi damage. Stone Stalker is great until a load of Rad attacks do mean things or I stand in stacked Quicksand. Rad / MA Tank will be slooooooow against bosses who rez or turn into something else. But most teams will counter / help with that, and if they don't just drop the diff a notch. 

 

[MoonSheep]

not being able to easily solo something at x8/+3 sounds like the game is functioning perfectly

 

a quick application of a hold, confuse or stun against enemies dishing out -acc works well to mitigate debuffs

 

i for one welcome enemy groups that encourage a more dynamic state of play and strategic thinking. a move away from City of Button Mashing is most welcome

[ZemX]

4 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Good!  I think the changes were meant to remove easy farming/sleeping your way to 50.

 

More redirect it, I think.  AE farming is there for people who want easy farming and sitting their way to 50.  Out in the game world, it's a good thing if you don't have pushover enemies like old Council that become everyone's punching bag because that causes teams to be more boring and repetitive.  Newbies joining those teams might be more quickly turned off if it's just an endless stream of Council punching-bags.

 

If this means less "Council PI Radios" teams then it's a success.  Doesn't mean PI Radios won't still be used as a leveling platform but if it means more people are just running whatever the police scanner hands them instead of reloading, reloading, reloading to get more easy Council to bash... so much the better.

[Ukase]

55 minutes ago, Judasace said:

People need to start taking Leadership/tactics. Stacked tactics would solve the -to hit, the confuse and the terrorize. I take Assault/Maneuvers/tactics on almost every character, because there's no reason not to. Unfortunately a lot of people follow build guides meant for farming or soloing +4/8.

 

People will say "builds are tight" but no, they're not. Builds were tight when you HAD to use up 3 powers to get stamina and two of those powers were only marginally useful. With inherent fitness, there's no reason for people not to replace those 3 powers with the leadership pool...again, unless they're building for farming/soloing/speedrunning.

 

So yeah, if you've got a "team" of farmers/soloers/speedrunners you're going to have problems. If even half the team has made an effort to put team powers into their build, it will be much less of a problem.

 

Personally I wish they'd give every enemy group a slight makeover that made fitting team powers into your build more useful.

I've a mixed mind about this. 
I do think leadership is a good set of powers - but what you're wishing for would be making us all do a cookie-cutter build, wouldn't it? Only instead of the solo/farm build, it's the teamed up/tf/trial build. 

One way of playing isn't any better or worse than another way of playing, is it? It's like donuts and Brussel sprouts. They're both food. They both have calories. One is more nutritious, sure. Eat too much of either one and you're going to have problems. 

I think the charm of CoH is that I can grab any 7 other players and hop into a mission and we can complete it. Sure, some players may struggle. Some may have it too easy. It all balances out. 

Yesterday, I ran a team doing one of Sunstorm's arcs. I looked at the powersets, levels, etc of the team and chose to run at +1, knowing that a team of 8 is going to have some +2 and +3s in it. But, it would be challenging for some, and some would have no issues at all. Without lightform, for me it was about right. Annoying dealing with the kb, but manageable. 
Then a couple folks left, and some folks that were higher level joined, and I upped the diff a notch, and it was really just right. 

I am not likely to ever run any content at +4/8 except a farm, or content that is that difficulty by default, like Tin Mage or Apex. (and even those, if we're level shifted, they're not really +4) Unless, it's a challenge character or something, but those are usually solo efforts. Nobody else needs to run at that setting either. 

I don't think we can tell our devs the game is too easy, and then harshly grade them when they move the slider a bit. Additionally, there should be no expectation that a PI radio team is going to run at +4/8, unless they can run at +4/8. 
It would seem that not everyone will be able to with these changes. It might be frustrating, but it's not going to hurt us. We just change the difficulty downward. 
Will it slow our inf and xp gain? Most likely. But so what? Annoying for some? Yeah, I get that. But we'll be okay in the long run. 
 

[Judasace]

27 minutes ago, Ukase said:

but what you're wishing for would be making us all do a cookie-cutter build, wouldn't it?

 

I literally said only half the team needed to do it. I don't think asking a few Defense based melees to cut out either Combat Jumping or Hover (Since they're kind of redundant except for the +Def) and replace it with tactics (especially when they're already taking maneuvers) is making everyone a cookie cutter build, in fact quite the opposite.

 

The Devs should make more use at more levels across enemy groups that make people either turn down the difficulty, build for a team or both. Not just in "advanced modes" either, but throughout the regular content. +0/1 can stay as it is, no solo bosses or AV's is fine (Hell I'd be fine if they wanted to turn Solo AV's in TF's into EB's - I'm not against solo playing ) but I'm in the camp that thinks +4/8 should wreck everything but a well run team, Speed running endgame content (Aeon, MLTF, LRSF) should be literally impossible, and no character should be able to solo above +1/3 at most - and don't even get me started on how characters are so powerful that you can just literally ignore the Hami Raid's mechanics and burn him down 5 times in a row every night. IMO everything else needs the difficulty turned up - Even with difficulty sliders, right now 99% of this game is about as challenging as kicking babies.

[Sovera]

Not to mention Tactics does not even protect against -Tohit. All it does is add a buffer that gets whittled down each time a -ToHit lands. Same as having a buff AT throwing a +defense shield and then we fight something like the romans who gleefully debuff defense with each time. Even 8 persons with Maneuvers (roughly 28% defense) would not stop catastrophic cascade failures.

 

Stacking Tactics is a full team tactic, but the truth is that in full teams the -tohit or even the -defense is not as problematic as it is for a soloer. Did the tank get its accuracy debuffed to oblivion? So what, the other 7 are raining nukes and AoEs.

 

But is that same tank solo? Now it is unable to hurt the enemies other than the small window where BU + Gaussian is active.

 

 

There are ways around this. Focused Accuracy as mentioned (Tsoo Sorc hurricanes, CoT big ghost -ToHit aura), sometimes counter-intuitively a few purples if the debuffs are carried in hits (CoT ghosts, Vampyr, etc).

 

I haven't found yellows that useful because they are not useful in normal play so who is going to carry several of them for the niche moment of being ToHit debuffed?

[Carnifax]

23 minutes ago, Sovera said:

I haven't found yellows that useful because they are not useful in normal play so who is going to carry several of them for the niche moment of being ToHit debuffed?

Acc is a multiplier to your final ToHit as well. So even popping a few won't make a huge difference if you're at like 6% ToHit

 

At 50 one thing I find really useful on my Rad Tank for dealing with Cascades is Ageless Radial. That's my "I'm sick of these red numbers" button. Gives you a breather and lets you reset (and move if needed) and gives the debuff stack time to wear off. 

 

[Judasace]

42 minutes ago, Sovera said:

Not to mention Tactics does not even protect against -Tohit. All it does is add a buffer that gets whittled down each time a -ToHit lands. Same as having a buff AT throwing a +defense shield and then we fight something like the romans who gleefully debuff defense with each time. Even 8 persons with Maneuvers (roughly 28% defense) would not stop catastrophic cascade failures.

 

Stacking Tactics is a full team tactic, but the truth is that in full teams the -tohit or even the -defense is not as problematic as it is for a soloer. Did the tank get its accuracy debuffed to oblivion? So what, the other 7 are raining nukes and AoEs.

 

But is that same tank solo? Now it is unable to hurt the enemies other than the small window where BU + Gaussian is active.

 

 

There are ways around this. Focused Accuracy as mentioned (Tsoo Sorc hurricanes, CoT big ghost -ToHit aura), sometimes counter-intuitively a few purples if the debuffs are carried in hits (CoT ghosts, Vampyr, etc).

 

I haven't found yellows that useful because they are not useful in normal play so who is going to carry several of them for the niche moment of being ToHit debuffed?

 

Radical notion: maybe players shouldn't be able to play +3/8 solo against everything. If the tank has to turn down the difficulty against certain groups to +1/2 is that a bad thing? Again, I'd argue that it would be good if everyone had to turn the difficulty down on everything, but as it stands it's one group of enemies that's the complaint - even the buffed Council is still manageable solo at high difficulties.

 

IMO if people don't like it, they should just go back to the AE building.

[ZemX]

1 minute ago, Carnifax said:

Acc is a multiplier to your final ToHit as well. So even popping a few won't make a huge difference if you're at like 6% ToHit

 

Yellow insps are not Accuracy.  They are +ToHit.  This is the fault of text descriptions.  They sometimes say a power (or in this case an inspiration) increases "ACC" but in fact it is +toHit. 

 

Still you may be right and it has no appreciable effect.   It depends on just how many toHit debuffs you have stacked on you.  It won't make any difference if you have so many toHit debuffs on you that even adding +37.5% doesn't bring you above the 5% floor.  You'll still be stuck at (Acc x 5%) in that case.

[Sovera]

5 minutes ago, Judasace said:

Radical notion: maybe players shouldn't be able to play +3/8 solo against everything. If the tank has to turn down the difficulty against certain groups to +1/2 is that a bad thing? Again, I'd argue that it would be good if everyone had to turn the difficulty down on everything, but as it stands it's one group of enemies that's the complaint - even the buffed Council is still manageable solo at high difficulties.

 

IMO if people don't like it, they should just go back to the AE building.

 

Not particularly radical. Not even particularly original. We've had this conversation a number of times and your point was one I and others already mentioned in the Focused Feedback threads during the testing of the new CoT and Council when players complained it was too difficult compared to the old CoT and Council: 'If it's too hard then lower the difficulty since you're literally fighting content meant for 8 people at max difficulty'.

[Sovera]

3 minutes ago, ZemX said:

 

Yellow insps are not Accuracy.  They are +ToHit.  This is the fault of text descriptions.  They sometimes say a power (or in this case an inspiration) increases "ACC" but in fact it is +toHit. 

 

Still you may be right and it has no appreciable effect.   It depends on just how many toHit debuffs you have stacked on you.  It won't make any difference if you have so many toHit debuffs on you that even adding +37.5% doesn't bring you above the 5% floor.  You'll still be stuck at (Acc x 5%) in that case.

 

Yeah, like defense debuffs that can go as low as -50. 'Oh sure, you ate two lucks and got 30%, that's cute, but it's still -20%' 😄

[strix_]

Ignoring the philosophical divide of whether you should be able to solo all content at 50+x8 (There's definitely an argument to be made that there's a sweet spot waiting to be found by the devs of content that's fun and interesting to play solo without being so difficult that you need to team or drastically rework your build to make soloing more viable, if you're bored of the constant TF/iTrial/MSR/Hami grind that group content becomes), and that if players have been bumping up to x8 to enjoy solo content more (whether that's for the rewards or not), that kind of content is not being found by them at 50x1 and so asking them to turn the difficulty down kinda misses the point of what their underlying issue is:

 

They're... mostly fine? I've had a decent time fighting the Council/CoT on my Level 50 char after the revamp both solo and in group content, despite a lot of my feelings on the Council's rework just shuffling out some very repetitive enemy types for different very repetitive enemy types. CoT are as annoying as they've always been, but at least they're annoying in different ways now. Council have a few boss-type enemies that can be death for low-damage output teams, but they're still the faction with the least gimmicks. I think after a patch or two of revisions (CoT bosses are really weak comparatively, and Council revives can proc a little too often) they'll be unanimously better than what they replaced.

[Ukase]

2 hours ago, Judasace said:

I don't think asking a few Defense based melees to cut out either Combat Jumping

I will NEVER cut out CJ from a build. I refuse. It's too useful as a set mule, and in the early levels before I can slot it, I feel the difference. 
I can certainly stomach losing the fight pool on certain characters, like a tank that might not need the extra resist from tough. 

But my characters require at least some kind of s/l resist from somewhere. Granted, we can have four pools. But, I require superspeed - that's one pool. CJ - that's another. Fight pool, that's 3. And Leadership. Yeah, I can squeeze in maneuvers at least. And I can turn it off if I'm not on a team so my endurance isn't drained into nothingness. 

But give up CJ? You must be putting some Bailey's in the coffee or something. That's just madness. 

[Player2]

13 hours ago, Parabola said:

The tohit debuff thing is why I take focused accuracy on just about every melee toon. I figured out a long time ago that it's the debuffs that are the cause of 90% of high level deaths and I build accordingly. It's not a new problem for cot though. Prior to the upgrade they would constantly spawn death mages who run a -tohit aura. Getting into a fistfight with four of them wasn't uncommon and it was only winnable with focused accuracy.

So basically this update has made Body Mastery Ancillary pool unskippable because Focused Accuracy is a must have power?

 

Seems like bad design, especially since they introduced new Ancillary pools for every AT.

[Parabola]

41 minutes ago, Player2 said:

So basically this update has made Body Mastery Ancillary pool unskippable because Focused Accuracy is a must have power?

 

Seems like bad design, especially since they introduced new Ancillary pools for every AT.

Not this update - as far as I am concerned FA has always been a must have. This update has just made it easier to run.