Adeon Hawkwood
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Quote:Honestly I think a lot of the player base has a lot of trouble seeing what any defender brings to the team other than green numbers. A lot of sets have an impact that is not particularly visible, enemies go down easier and are tougher people but they don't realize why. This anecdote is a good example:Originally Posted by BurningChick
I think Traps has a spotty reputation with a big chunk of the playerbase because, outside of FFG and the lulzy Triage Beacon, it's very, very tough to get a good sense of what a trapper brings to a team. But if you take one out for a spin, and work in some +recharge bonuses and Leadership toggles (Traps is not particularly end-draining, so I can manage to run all three toggles), it's easy to see how effective it is.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...1&postcount=17
The forums represent a small portion of the player base and are overall the most knowledgeable portion. A lot of people don't really understand what support toons do, they know they need them but not why. For example I was doing a Numina TF recently and by chance it ended up REALLY support heavy: 2 tanks, 1 blaster, 1 controller and 4 defenders. The opinion of the rest of the team? We had to many Defenders and two of them decided to alt. My opinion: the only number of Defenders that is to many is 9 since a team can only hold 8, we could have kicked the blaster and one of the tanks and found 2 more defenders/controllers (ok, technically we could have kicked both tanks for one more support toon but it was my TF and I wanted to level my tank
). Later that same day I joined a Moonfire TF that once again was support heavy and the general opinion was that we needed more "damage" and should find a blaster or scrapper.
Traps in particular is very non-flashy so it's even less obvious to people. Add in the fact that it was redside exclusive for a long time so a lot of people had minimal exposure to the set (I can recall only one occasion of teaming with a Trapper on one of my heroes before Defenders got it). Also it's more flexible than most of the other sets so it doesn't really provide a single focus for people to latch onto. For example Rad is regarded as important for killing AVs due to the period of time when AVs had ridiculous regen, Empathy is regarded as providing the heals (even though that isn't what a good Empath does), Storm is regarded as being horrible on teams because it scatters enemies (since the bad Stormies give the good ones a bad rep).
I think so. I have an unhealthy obsession with TrapsQuote:Originally Posted by Steel_Shaman
Adeon, wasn't it you that told me on the Blaster forum to give a Traps/AR a try when I was considering AR/Dev? Well I did and he hit 13 last night. You were right, he's very fun.
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Quote:The problem with that is that a lot of other characters can have basically the same impact by hitting the problem enemy with a single target mez (or if it's a boss two people mez it).Originally Posted by Zamuel
I think a lot of the problem actually is that Stalkers buff the team in a way that is hard to quantify and admittedly is not common enough. Sapper = dead helps a team but there's not enough situations where there's an individual problem enemy that needs to die immediately. Don't get me wrong, they could stand to be buffed but it seems like they'd be harder to pinpoint the exact hard numbers needed.
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Quote:In general you want to slot your blasts for damage. Short circuit is the main exception, it's worth slotting for both damage and -endurance through the magic of Frankenslotting.Originally Posted by Invisobill
Thanks for the feedback guys. I am definitely taking Tornado because it just seems so damned cool. Also, I was wondering how I should be slotting a defender. Obviously for the primary I should be slotting for whatever buff/debuff the power grants. For electric, I was thinking, where available, should I be slotting for -endurance
Fulmens has a good guide on it here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...7&postcount=23 -
Quote:You know, there is a good example of this sort of method at work even here in CoX: the Hamidon Raid. The nature of the raid basically means that the only form of damage mitigation that has any real effect is regen. Hamidon's attacks ignore defense and resistance (except for that provided by EoEs), -damage and -to hit are basically useless and the effectiveness of healing is drastically reduced by the resist heal debuff from his attacks. Consequently regen is the only effective form of mitigation.Originally Posted by Rigel_Kent
In some MMORPGs, there are three trinity roles (DPS, tanking, or healing), and to make game balance easier for the devs, the devs make non trinity roles (buffing, debuffing, mezzing) just about useless.
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For Storm I would say Gale, Thunderclap and Tornado are all potentially skippable depending on your style. In Electrical Blast Aim, Zapp, Tesla Cage and Thunderous Blastare skippable, again depending on preferences.
Note that with the exception of Zapp I wouldn't say any of these are useless for your character (I don't care for snipes on a debuffing Defender) but these are the ones I'd consider optional when looking for room for power pools. In particular I'd advise taking at least one of Tesla Cage or Thunderclap since both are handy but different people will prefer one to the other. -
None of them are removed. instead the effectiveness of enhancements scales down.
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Exempl...n_Enhancements -
Quote:Nope, and wikipedia does not seem to want to enlighten meOriginally Posted by Talen Lee
Are you familiar with the term 'aspirational item,'
Well according to basic economic theory they will always buy the cheapest one of suitable quality. Of course real people tend to buy them the one that best suits their needs which includes price, quality, time to acquire and whether it is better than the one owned by their neighbors/friends/coworkers/family. For us price and time to acquire are the only really relevant facotrs.Quote:and the way that people handle a variety of prices for similar objects? -
Quote:I really don't understand your reasoning here. To me having more information on pricing history means less work, not more. Currently if I want to know the pricing on items that sell more than 5 a day my only recourse is to leave bids overnight and see what happens. Plus I have to remember this information. If more historical information is available I can simply look at that to see what it is rather than needing to test and remember it myself.Originally Posted by Talen Lee
Those same people are not exactly about to clap for joy that a system gets put in place where they can put in even more effort for even more chance at reward.
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Quote:I'm not convinced it would. More info would be useful to marketeers but most of the good ones already know pretty much what it would show. Conversely the have-nots who are actually willing to think and learn have a MUCH easier time doing so. plus when the whiners come here we can point to the graphs as evidence that they are wrongOriginally Posted by Hyperstrike
However, I feel this would simply widen the gap between the marketers and the have-nots..
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Quote:So what? I have zero interest whatsoever in helping the impatient. My interest is in lowering the barriers of entry to those who are willing to be patient. Currently someone who rarely uses the market might be perfectly patient but with only the last 5 sales to go on it can be very hard for someone who doesn't regularly use the market to know what the long term market price is. Providing more historical pricing info (even just small stuff like last 48 hour low and high sales) would allow someone with patience but a lack of info to make more informed pricing decisions thereby lowering the barrier to entry.Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
The problem is, the impatient won't really use the increased functionality.
They're going to look at however much the last few went for and go nuts bidding. -
Quote:Agreed, but it would make it easier for a patient bidder who doesn't follow the market to get an idea as to the true market value. My interest with this sort of thing is not reducing prices for the impatient it's reducing the knowledge gap for the patient.Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
This will slightly stabilize "buy it nao" prices a bit. That's about all. It won't affect the prices paid by patient bidders one iota.
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I'm betting that Going Rogue will add a couple of new day job locations.
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Quote:TA is very nice as a secondary support set. It's got a decent mix of powers to help a team. However, it has virtually no ability to mitigate the impact of an alpha strike and it's defensive powers overall are not that great (outside of EMP arrow which rocks). So while it's nice to have one around to boost damage you do not want to rely on it as your sole form of support unless you are confident that you don't need any damage mitigation.Originally Posted by Mod_Noc
I never tried /TA. Is it really that powerful?
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Quote:The nice thing about IOs is that you can easily and cheaply do both. I recently did a bit of frankenslotting with level 30 IOs on my Controller so my single target controls have about 90% damage enhancement and about 44% enhancement to recharge, accuracy, endurance and control. It was pretty cheap as well, I bought the recipes for <10K each although I did overpay for the salvage due to laziness.Originally Posted by SBeaudway
I'll agree that if you slot for damage instead of control, various controllers can do good single target damage.
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Quote:The advantage of PvP IO farming is that you can do it while AFK. Basically they set one character with an attack on autofire and one with a self rez on autofire and leave. They generally aim for a kill cycle of just over 5minutes for the reason you specified. So no one chance evbery 5 minutes isn't great until you realize they can easily do it for 16+ hours a day.Originally Posted by DirtyDan
Short of maybe a large group effort, I just don't see how you could efficiently farm PVP recepies (and isn't efficiency what "farming" is all about). Two accounts alone wouldn't really do it, since there is a 5 minute limit on drops per character (i.e. with 2 accounts you could get at most 2 chances per 5 minutes, one per character, of a drop).
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Quote:This is one of the most controversial aspects of the auction house. Personally my opinion is that blind bidding and the ability to leave standing buy orders in place makes the market a lot more useful to someone with limited time although I would like to see more price history.Originally Posted by seebs
I think CoH's "bidding" concept is neat, but the net effect is that you have no way of guessing what a market price for an item is.
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Quote:The value of swap ammo is twofold. First it allows you to tailor your damage a bit to avoid enemy resistances (for example most robots are resistant to lethal damage but not fire or cold). Secondly it allows you to change the debuff type of your blasts. The debuffs from any blast set are weak, after all it's a blast set not a debuff set, and the ones from Dual pistols are slightly weaker than most. However the advantage for Dual Pistols is the ability to switch debuffs on the fly according to your needs. Knockback, Slow and -Dam all have different uses depending on team, enemy group and the situation and no other blast set has the ability to switch between the three at will.Originally Posted by BunnyAnomaly
I'm a little disappointed with swap ammo, the debuff is absolutely minimal and it seems almost pointless right now. Hopefully I'll see something more soon that justifies its expenditure.
On my DP/Storm Corr I tend to use Toxic ammo as my default since it complements Storm but I use the other types when doing so makes sense. -
I rarely target through any teammate. I will occasionally target through a teammate who's taking heavy damage if I can't easily see what's attacking him on the grounds that he probably can but most of the time I prefer precise targeting.
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It's always possible there's a graphical bug of some sort but the damage is applied properly. The other thing to keep in mind (especially with narrower cones like energy torrent) is that targeting a further away enemy will make the cone line up more accurately. Targeting an enemy right next to you means that even small changes in relative positions will impact the line of the cone whereas targeting an enemy at the maximum range will angle the cone much more accurately.
If you're in doubt I recommend going to a low level hazard zone (Perez Park maybe) and experimenting on the groups there. Stand right next to one enemy and use him as your cone target and see what happens. -
Actually it's your imagination. The Nova form cones have a range of 60ft, most other blast set cones have a range of 40ft. This may not sound like much but a lot of the time the natural range for a fight is about 20-40ft so if you target the front person in that situation with a 40ft cone it will appear as if the cone is stopping simply because the guys behind him are out of range.
As someone who plays two assault rifle characters I can assure you that the cones do go past the targeted enemy, however with 40ft cones you really need to get in thier face to cover the entire group. -
I'd recommend everything except for Suppression Fire and maybe Hail of Bullets. You might skip the two other AoEs if you like running at low team size difficulty (i.e. +1/x2 or something) but otherwise I'd say take it all and laugh manically while doing so.
I will now be extremely vain and repost my opinions on DP for Defenders:
Quote:Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Yeah, I've been thinking a bit about this and I'm inclined to say that Dual Pistols is one of those blast sets which really needs a lot of powers to be effective, especially for a Defender/Corruptor.
If you look at the "generic" Blast set you have the following:
3 Single Target Attacks
1 Cone
1 Targeted AoE
1 Aim
1 Single Target Mez
1 Snipe
1 Nuke
Obviously most of them don't follow this exactly but it's pretty much the base version that they differ from.
So... in general with the generic set you want 5 powers: the 3 single target attacks and the 2 AoEs. This gives you a decent single target attack chain for tough enemies and AoE damage for dealing with minions. These 5 powers also tend to be in every set (although in some sets the format for them is a little unusual such as Ignite for the third st attack in AR). The other four powers in the set (Aim, the Snipe, the Mez power and the nuke) are the more skippable powers (depending on the rest of your build) and are also the ones most likely to be replaced with set-specific powers.
In Dual Pistols three of these four powers are replaced with other powers that are generally more attractive than the original power (in 2 cases MUCH more attractive). Swap Ammo replaces Aim, Piercing Rounds replaces the Snipe and Hail of Bullets replaces the nuke. Swap Ammo and Piercing Rounds are both VERY attractive to a defender since they increase your ability to perform your primary goal of debuffing enemies, in particular Swap Ammo allows you to tailor your debuffing to fit the situation. Hail of Bullets is less attractive since it isn't quite as good as the other crashless mini-nukes (Full Auto and Rain of Arrows) but for a Defender who will be in melee range anyway (such as Traps or Kinetics) it makes a lot of sense.
So for a Dual Pistols Defender we have got the 5 damage powers most Defenders will want plus two powers that provide solid increases to the Defenders debuffing potential. The last two (Suppressive Fire and Hail of Bullets) are less essential but depending on your primary there is a good chance that one or both will be useful to the Defender.
The net effect of this is that Dual Pistols is a more power intensive set than most other Defender secondaries (for example on my Traps/AR I only have 6 AR powers but on a Traps/DP I would take or even 9 of them).
Now the question I'm sure you're thinking is "but Adeon, surely a Defender doesn't need all 5 damage powers?" Well technically no he doesn't but for most sets skipping them is a poor idea. Archery and Radiation are the main exceptions since the lower than normal recharge on their first two blasts make it easier to spam their T1 blast and skip their T2 but for other sets the longer recharge means more downtime between blasts without this. As for skipping the AoEs, doing this decreases the value of the blast debuffs. The debuffs in blast sets are relatively short duration and often impossible to enhance (for example the -dam from using Toxic Ammo) as such stacking two different AoEs provides better debuffing than you get with just one. This also applies to skipping one of the single target blasts when you are fighting a tough AV.
The primary purpose of blast sets for a Defender is, of course, damage but the debuffs they provide do have utility and it's important to keep this in mind when planning out a defender build. -
Quote:I'm betting you have Executioner's Shot on those builds though. Trying to solo a Defender (or heck any character) with only a single single target attack sounds excruciatingly painful to me. I know on my AR characters I always feel limited by only have two single target attacks (since the setup and cast time on ignite means I only bring it out against bosses).Originally Posted by HacknSlash
Well... I didn't miss Pistols on my DP/dark corr, or my DP/dev blaster, so I figured skipping Dual Wield wouldn't be too crippling on most defenders.
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Quote:*shrug* My only complaint about Empty Clips is the awful animation time. The damage an size are comparable to powers in other sets (primarily Buckshot and Fistful). The animation time is horrible but that's true for quite a few powers in Dual Pistols. If you skip Empty Clips then you only have one true AoE and honestly I'd say EC is a better power than Bullet Rain since it's got a much sorter recharge.Originally Posted by macskull
Empty Clips is a pretty crappy cone unless you pair it with /Energy (Boost Range does nice things to short-range cones). Boost Range also has the nice side effect of making Piercing Rounds easier to use, so I'd go with PR in a flash.
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What I would like is the capability to use the female heads and hair styles on male bodies. The female armored models look (IMHO) horribly unreaslistic but if I use the male model I can't have an "armor without helmet" costume.
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Quote:I think my AR/Dev picked up something like 70+% accuracy from set bonuses without even trying (mostly from Thunderstrike and Positron's Blast sets)Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Messing around with Mids I also realized that slotting sets already vastly reduced my need for the drone.