Antigonus

It is very true. Scrappers are BAD. Brutes and Tanks worse. Stalkers are only melee AT even worth looking at if you want to actually kill something. Suvivability is great, but what's the point if you can't kill anything? I play a Sonic/Pain Corr almost every night in RV and sometimes Sirens and I have literally NEVER died to a Scrapper that didn't have at least two buddies, and I can almost always take down one or more of them in the process. If it takes 3 or more Scrappers to kill one Corr, than yes, they are bad.

It's a simple concept. Don't bring a stick to a gun fight.

Don't get discouraged by this, but melee is not the best option for PvP in this game. With so many powerful ranged attacks available, melee gets outclassed and outgunned pretty fast. Trying to stay within striking distance of a ranged opponent is almost impossible. That is partly why Rei recommends Stalker over Brute. Stalkers are about the only effective melee AT because they have the ability to get within striking distance quickly and without being seen and have the tools to hit a moving target as well.

It's not that bad for Stalkers. Blasters have a Defense soft cap of 20% in zones, where as Stalkers soft cap is 40%. Still not great but it's doable. Thanks to DR it will take ~70% PvE defense to reach that 40% in zones however, which could get expensive to do with IOs. SR really isn't the cheapest set to PvP with these days.

I was thinking, "It's 5 o'clock somewhere."

And how many people would be so upset by server mergers that they would actually quit the game? What percentage do you think that would be? Do you think it would be significant enough to keep NCSoft from doing it? Consider that the majority of those people most likely play on the lowest population servers. During regular periods when there isn't a new release, how many of those servers would you have to add together to equal the population of Freedom or Virtue alone? Three? The four lowest would be my guess, and that's assuming everybody on those servers does not want mergers. I would guess that at the most they would lose a few hundred subs due to ragequit if servers were merged. Roughly equal to the number of PvPers that left after issue 13, and we all know how much NCSoft cared about them now don't we? And lets be honest, if the servers were reduced by three, any new players wouldn't even know that there were three fewer servers than there was at this point in time. All they would know is that there sure seems to be alot of people around.

Again, not saying they should do it, especially in light of the success that GR is showing right now. In 4-6 months we will have a better idea of the future of the game. People with yearly subs might want to rethink their decision.

Since the majority of subs are monthly, that would require new content at minimun every other month to keep people from dropping every time they complete the newest stuff. Not only that, it would have to be fairly significant content to actually keep people renewing their subs. That would certainly be nice, but probably unrealistic.

Merging servers would be less desirable, but probably more realistic in the current economic climate. I'm not saying it should happen, but it most likely will if GR doesn't turn things around long term. If we are seeing pre-GR numbers next quarter, mergers might be the next step.

I noticed that as well. Plastic and metal are snacks in Japan? They are a strange people.

There are however posts with pictures showing one day loads as if to say "LOOK WE HAVE POPULATION THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS".

You know exactly what was meant Forbin.

Apparently you missed the point. The point is that games targeting a demographic that isn't really known for having a significant MMO presence are showing higher numbers than this game. That is sad.

Technically, every game out is a niche game. The question is, why is CoXs niche so small compared to so many others. If NeoPets and Club Penguin have bigger shares of the market than CoX, there is a problem.

Actually, I would say that it is extremely relevant. If porting the power set to another melee AT that serves a similar function on teams illuminates an imbalance, than it needs to be fixed across the board. Broken is broken regardless of how it becomes noticed. Considering that Castle was messing around with changing Rage not long ago, I imagine he feels that it is overpowered on Brutes and Tanks, and that would be why we won't see it on Scrappers until he's happy with it.

Essentially, you sir are correct, but probably not in the way you really wanted to be.

I recommend JLA: Earth 2 graphic novel. He really gets Martian Manhunter better than most any other writer, and somehow manages to make Aquaman into a bonified bada$$. The fight between Ultraman and Martian Manhunter is only 4 panels but well worth the price of admission alone.

Exactly. It's far less broken on Tanks because they do significantly less damage with a lower damage cap. Brutes are a little bit broken in my opinion because the +damage cap is so much higher and Rage is easy to stack. Scrappers with higher modifiers and higher damage cap would be OMGSTUPID broken.

I would swear that Castle was messing with Rage on test not too long ago in an attempt to find something he liked better, but I couldn't find anything in a post search. Anybody else remeber that?

I think it would have to be a pretty significant reduction to be even remotely balanced. I'm pretty sure that Scrappers were never really intended to have that kind of sustained self buff. The only thing that really comes close is Follow Up from Claws set and those bonuses are fairly low comparatively. Scrappers are just more bursty damage wise.

Regardless, of how they would go about it, it would probably require a great deal of coding and even more testing to be balanced. I would hope that the devs would have more on their plates in the coming months than that kind of time requirement would allow.

The simple answer? Rage. The devs don't like how it works on Tanks and Brutes, so they sure as hell aren't going to try to port that headache over to Scrappers and, dare I say it, Stalkers. It would require some serious rebalancing to not break the game wide open.

When they are satisfied with how that power is balanced, then we may see it proliferated. Not likely till then.

Because Fitness/SS/SJ is a given, the other pools to choose from to round out your build are those he listed. The proven builds will have either Tactics or Concealment pool and Cold or Force APPs.

Ah yes, I see.


Take a look at those quarterlies again Forbin. There has in fact been a fairly constant drop, not a rise and fall as you seem to think. As I mentioned, the only quarter that actually saw any significant rise was when CoV was released. It's been mostly all downhill before that and since. Still enough of a population so far to make it worth maintaining, but probably not for much longer if the downward trend of 4%-5% loss per quarter continues.

I'm not stating this to cry doom. Just pointing out the facts for the discussion.

Please define "healthy" vs. "declining".

In the years that sub numbers were reported, NCSoft showed loss of subs every quarter but one as I recall, and that was the release of CoV. It would be a logical assumption then that the downward trend would have continued in the period since NCSoft stopped reporting sub numbers, since there hasn't been anything released since that time that could be considered as groundbreaking game wise as CoV. Based on that alone it seems irrefutable that the population is in fact declining. It very likely is still in a healthy place as far as the industry is concerned, but how long will that be if they are losing the roughly 4%-5% subscriptions quarterly that has been reported in the past.

Whether anybody likes the idea or not, at some point server consolidation will have to be a consideration. We may be seeing that day sooner than we would all like, since I suspect that there is a lot more riding on GR than has been let on. It's fine to be supportive of our game and optimistic for the future, but we should also be realistic.

How much was Arcanaville payed for her contributions to issue 13 PvP?

They already have the people to do the code. There are alot of people right here on the forums who would gladly contribute their time for free if it could improve the game if the devs were actually willing to listen.

The reason for the poor return on investment is that the devs have never worked with anybody that actually understands CoX PvP. Or PvP in general for that matter, apparently. Don't get me wrong, Arcanaville has forgotten more about math stuff than most of us have ever learned, but she's not a PvPer.

They need to bring on people who understand PvP. Not just the math. Not just the mechanical aspects. People who get it. You know, like PvPers. We've reached out to them and given them ideas that they have almost completely ignored, I suspect because they didn't understand them. The ideas that actually were implemented were generally pretty low on the list and were obviously nothing more than an appeasement. The changes that issue 13 brought made it pretty obvious they weren't listening. The devs need to understand that if they ever want to see a reasonable return on their investment, they need to actually listen to the PvP community, not just pay lipservice.

Not better damage resistance, but resistance to Heat Exhaustion specifically. It won't change the fact that a decent Thermal Corr will still wreck you, but it will take longer since they won't drop your toggles.

Please, do not play a Stalker if you are just getting into PvP. Stalkers, like Scrappers and Tanks will only teach you bad habits. There are already too many terrible Stalkers with no clue how to AS, just spamming Sharks. Learn the PvP game before you go down that road, please.

I play SC just because I HATE the layout of RV. It's a horrible zone for PvPing. Too many wide open spaces with no cover that favor EM Blasters.