Adeon Hawkwood

^^This.

Tin Mage is (IMHO) boring, the Director 11 fight is mildly interesting but the rest is just a slog through hordes of +4 clockwork with humongous -recharge debuffs (which I think are auto-hit as well).

Apex on the other hand has an enjoyable first mission (which really manages to feel like a running street battle) and an interesting boss fight.

I really do not see why people think Dark Pit is rubbish. It gives you the ability to stun most or all of the minions in a spawn (spending on how they are clustered) at range and it's in a Blast set.

Now I agree it's going to be less useful when paired with a Buff/Debuff set that already provides decent control (such as Dark Maisma) but for some of the other Buff/Debuff sets it's a very useful tool. For example on an Empathy/Dark Defender Dark Pit can provide a very nice reduction in incoming damage. Plus if Blasters ever get Dark Blast (please devs?) I'm sure the ability to mez a spawn's worth of minions would be useful.

I can see saying that the power needs to be rebalanced with a different duration/recharge/accuracy/endurance equation but I just can't understand why people think it's useless.

Well "they look bad on huge characters" was pretty much the reason the devs gave when asked about it before. Maybe it is just the devs being lazy , honestly I don't know but I will point out most of the time if it's just a case of feeling something isn't worth the effort they say that rather than saying that they have problems doing it right.

This is why I ignore her.

As I understand it the problem isn't selecting the attach point it's due to the way that the pieces interact with the body. The wings naturally imbed themselves in the body so the fact that they are sitting at varying distances from the characters actual "back" isn't really noticeable. However for jetpacks to look good they really need to rest fluch against the character's back which means that the distance of the costume part fromt he attach point varies based on the character's body type and size.

Actually the reason permanent jetpacks wouldn't look good already applies to the temporary jetpacks. If you use the current temp jetpacks on certain characters (primarily ones with the "huge" bodytype or who have their physique on the high end of the scale it tends to imbed itself in their back. If they put them in like that as stnadard costume pieces the same thing would apply.

So adding the current ones as permanent pieces would result in them not looking good for at least some portion of characters.

Good point, Pulsar is a Thunderclap clone isn't it? Misremembered there.

In theory all DP powers get worse debuff effects compared to other blast sets to make up for the increased flexibility. However I agree that this shouldn't really have been applied to mez durations.

Because they are AoE control powers that can (with a bit of effort) recharge enough to be up every spawn. Most of the AoE controls in the game (not just stuns) have a lower than average accuracy, that is presumably a part of the mertic the devs use when balancing them. Considering how powerful controls are in this game I don't think it's unjustified.

Yes, it's not a control power it's an attack power that happens to do a bit of control. Realistically increasing it to be mag 3 would mean for balance reasons it needs to either have the proc chance reduced or the recharge/endurance costs increased.

It probably could use 1x accuracy but the mag seems ok. It stuns minions and has a 50% chance of stunning LTs along with knocking everyone down. Personally that sounds useful to me but I don't play melee much.

I would say the knockback is more of a problem than anything else. If that were changed to knockdown it would be a nice power for a SS character to taunt an entire spawn.

It's a tradeoff. Most blast sets give the user the ability to mez one LT (or possibly stack it and mez a boss). Dark Blast gives them the ability to mez a group of minions. Overall I would consider that a fair tradeoff and actually one of the defining features of Dark Blast.

This one I agree with. Warshades get Gravitic Emanation which is significantly more powerful and I'm not sure why. I think the problem is that the devs still have a bit of ranged = good mentality in their balance methods so Pulsar being a Targeted AoE is considered "better" than Gravitic Emanation's large cone.

Well the cost and damage are a factor of it being an MM attack, rather than anything power specific. The stun itself is a secondary effect rather than the main power and is actually inline with the stun on other similar powers (such as Whirling Hands). Robotics as a whole was left out in the cold when secondary effects were handed out for the personal attacks but the same is true of several other MM sets and at least Robotics has what are generally considered the best pets.


Overall I don't think stuns have a problem. The issue is that most of them turn up either in sets which do not have a control focus (i.e. various attack based sets) or as secondary effects on attack powers and as such they are not going to be as strong as a Controller's Hold powers.

It's sometimes worth doing 5 Red Fortune + 1 LotG if you're going for an ultra-high recharge build but in general I agree.

I tend to take a middle ground, there are a LOT of heroes in Paragon City, but only a handful who are top tier heroes (i.e. level 50).

Swing by the Black Market in Cap Au Diablo, it's normally pretty busy and a polite request for somebody to open a portal for you will almost always be fulfilled. Personally I use this on most of my characters since it means I can run whatever content I want without needing to worry about getting the portal (I also try to pay it forward by opening a portal for others when I see a request).

I don't think Fleeting Whisper wasn't implying that there's something wrong with players for not putting them on the market but with the recipes themselves. As you noted the recipes don't really go for much and the powers themselves are untradeable. His point was that the fact that there is no demand shows that players don't care about them which means the powers were unsuccessful as a concept.

I agree with this, I think they should have given it shards a higher drop rate and increased the number required proportionally (i.e. double the drop chance but double the number needed as well). The RNG is a harsh mistress and doing this would make the bell curve depicting "kills for alpha boost" taller and thinner with fewer people experiencing the outliers.

Well said, Solo'er != Introvert, Teamer != Extrovert. I am socially very much an introvert but I love teaming in CoX and regularly lead teams or TFs.

The reason is that teaming in CoH is something I find to be socially very safe. I don't have to make small talk with my teammates. I don't need to hold philosophical discussions with them on the meaning of life. I just need to point them in the direction of something to bash and go for it. From a social point of view my teammates might as well be AI driven bots and that makes things a lot simpler (I try not to actually think of them that way because that would be kinda mean).

The other nice bit is that teaming in CoX does not require huge amounts of coordination, I have a much harder time playing team games in any situation where I need to use a mic to coordinate. Text communication is slower but it's also serves as a barrier to non-essential communication which in turn encourages the "no small talk" item mentioned above. I can use a mic in teaming (I do in TF2 for example) but I find it a lot more draining and tend not to speak much.

The thing is superhero names mean different things to different people. Personally I find that in a city which has hundreds of heroes registered by the government that the idea of an actual code name strains my suspension of disbelief. As such most of my characters do heroics under their own name which I generally make up to sounds good and where possible be evocative of who they are (i.e. my Earth/Storm Controller is called Empocledes Mastric).

As for bios, remember that not everyone likes writing. Most of my characters have bios, I just rarely bother to write them down.

I would say that Dark Pit on an Empathy Defender is a lot more useful than Dark Pit on a Dark Defender. Dark Maisama already provides a decent amount of control and other forms of soft mitigation through it's other powers so while Dark Pit is useful (especially if paired with Opressive Gloom) it's not essential. Conversely Empathy has limited proactive mitigation (Fortitude is a good buff but it doesn't cover everyone) so having a power than can add a good chunk of team level mitigation is a lot more useful.

There is no easy answer to this. The Alpha Slot is essentially functioning as additional enhancements so the question you need to ask is "what enhancement type do I want more of?". In power's that do not have 3 SOs of the particular enhancement it basically functions as adding an additional SO, in powers that are already ED capped it's more like adding an extra DO (ignoring ED). This will change with the higher tier ones since a higher portion ignores ED.

So my advice when selecting an Alpha Boost for the Math Impaired is look through your powers and see what enhancement type you wish you had more of. Unless you're doing the Apex or Tin Mage TFs, in which case I'd say go for the Nerve enhancement because most SO'd builds are short on accuracy against +4s.

I agree. I think the core issue is that if you think about it logically every character actually has two origins. The first is "where did they come from" the second is "where did their powers come from". Depending on the character either can realistically be used as their in-game origin, which one makes more sense can differ from person to person and from character to character.

For example consider Tin Mage, under this system he's Tech/Magic (i.e. he himself is an artifact of technology but his powers are magical). Which Origin should be used for him in game? Personally I'd say Magic since I'd say that is the defining aspect of who he is.

The TMNT on the other hand are Science/Natural but I would say their in game origin is "Science" because being mutated turtles is the defining aspect of who they are.

One way in which it IS useful to compare Traps and Devices is in terms of animation times. Traps has five powers that involve dropping a gadget at your current location. Three of those have animation times just over 2 seconds but the two copied from Devices have much longer animation times. This illustrates the legacy problems both sets have.

I think that when the devs designed Traps they realized that the long animation times of Trip Mine and Time Bomb did not really mesh well with the rest of the game. Consequently the rest of the Traps powers were designed with a shorter animation time to accommodate this.