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Quote:Ah, you're correct, it looks like the Defiance duration for all of the interruptable powers in Devices are wrong. Interruptable powers (like Snipes) are supposed to have a duration of 7.5seconds + cast time - interruptable time which would mean that the bonus lasts for 7.5secodns after you finish animating the power (as is true for all other Blaster powers). However Trip Mine, Time Bomb and Gun Drone were apparently all given durations equal to interrupt time + 7.5 seconds.What I said and what you think I said I am guessing are two different things. Oh hang on a sec. I didn't go by redtomax I went by ingame. The +damage on defiance dropped immediately after or when timebomb went off.
Edit: Yep just tested, as soon as it exploded my damage bonus was gone. Screw the websites. -
I don't think it's an aspect of mission design, I think it's symptomatic of the design of the combat system as a whole. The way the system is balanced you can relatively easily get a team (or even a single character) that can survive virtually indefinitely through use of passive forms of damage mitigation (i.e. defense, -to hit, resistance, regen etc.). Since passive damage mitigation is generally more reliable than active damage mitigation and it allows you to position enemies as you wish it makes for faster killing which in turn leads to a higher rate of rewards and thus it is what people choose to pursue.
This, combined with extremely high AoE damage (compared to other MMOs) encourages a playing style where you use passive mitigation to reduce incoming damage and fight the entire spawn at once as opposed to the style in other MMOs where you try to separate the enemies and engage them 1 or 2 at a time.
Take Detention Field for example. In CoX it's generally regarded as a rather poor power on teams since taking an enemy out of the fight means that either you have to wait around to kill them or you have them chasing you to the next spawn both of which effectively slow down your killing rate. No suppose the power existed in WoW it would be regarded as an extremely useful power for recovering from a bad pull. -
Quote:No it doesn't, it lasts cast time + 7.5 seconds, same as every other Blaster power (actually the interruptable Devices powers seem to last interrupt time + 7.5secodns instead):The damage bonus from Timebomb lasts until the moment it goes off so I find that you can pull with a nice shot..and maybe the enemies will get to it in time. I wouldn't use it unless I needed a lower actual fight duration though.
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...gets.Time_Bomb -
Quote:Sure, it's important not to pursue set bonus at the expense of actually enhancing your powers but the example you give isn't really true. The reason global recharge is popular is that it's easy to get, it benefits most of your powers, it's obtainable at a level equivalent to actual slotting and it stacks with recharge enhancements while ignoring ED.Another thing to note is the actual stats of your power, which to me is the MOST important thing when it comes to slotting your powers(obviously). There's no point in going for a global recharge of +30% if all your powers are only slotted for +33% recharge. Sure, the global recharge of +30% would then put your powers at +63% recharge but you could've easily slotted these powers with 1 recharge SO each and be at the same value. This is just an example, I'm not just talking about +recharge bonuses for IO's, I'm saying that you should keep your stats in mind when you slot them for IO's.
Take your example, you note that if you have 33% global recharge you could get the same effect by putting a recharge SO in every power. Try looking at it from the other direction, having 33% global recharge is equivalent to having an extra recharge SO in every power. You have 24 powers, how many of them will benefit from an extra recharge SO? Are any of those ED capped to recharge? How many of them have fewer than 6 slots? Do you have sufficient spare slots to add an extra SO to every power? In most cases building up global recharge is a LOT more effective than trying to add more regular enhancements to every power that would benefit.
For example, on my Traps/AR I have long recharges (90 seconds) on three of my key Traps powers plus a 60 second recharge on Full Auto (which deals a lot of AoE damage), I want these four up as often as possible so I already ED capped all of them for recharge. Therefore adding more recharge enhancements would be pointless. However using IOs I can increase my global recharge which is equivalent to adding more enhancements to them without all of that pesky ED reduction (I have soemthing like 50% global recharge, not huge but I wanted decent defense as well). -
Pretty much anything works well. AR is quite nice for a TF build. You get good AoE to help clearing out the regular groups and Ignite uses the Blaster damage scale so you get more damage against AVs. Plus Traps plays well when you're in near-melee range and so does AR.
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As Kitsune said CoX is VERY heavily instanced, as such it's quite rare to see other players out and about (except in a few heavily populated areas). The advice to join your server's global channels is probably the best bit of advice you'll get when it comes to teams (go down to the forum dedicated to your server and ask there for info on them).
And welcome to the game. -
Quote:Ok, I'll admit that is funny, but I think it also illustrates the problem with Time Bomb (and to some extent the rest of Devices). The Blaster wasn't playing on the team, he was soloing inside a mission which happened to contain other people. A Devices Blaster can potentially solo much larger spawns than most other blasters (assuming he's willing to take the time to set it up) but those tactics just don't work on a team except in very limited circumstances or if the Blasters doesn't stay with the team.all this aside, one of the funniest groups I was ever on had a device blaster who did exactly what you describe Techbot. We entered the mission and the Blaster cloaks up and disappeared. We moved thru the mission and every now and then could hear the bombs going off and gunfire. On several occasions we saw the invisible blaster fly by us followed by a few mobs, only to watch them hit a trip mine that was carefully placed before we arrived. When the mission complete bell sounded, we had only explored half the map.
Some folks in the group were not impressed, but I was laughing my *** off. -
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Overall I'd say Force and Ice are the strongest blaster epics in terms of actually adding suvivability. Fire has a decent hold and Bonfire is useful as a defensive positioning tool (at least solo, on a team it's a power you have to be careful with). Electricity is mostly useful if you want more AoE damage alongside a hold and two panic buttons (I'm not a big fan of Surge of Power but EM Pulse is pretty cool for a Blaster power). Munitions I would say is the weakest, Body Armor has less than half the resistance of the other shields and while both Suviallance and LRM are very cool they aren't really game changing, in fact the power I like best is Sleep Grenade, if you're soloing and have good single target damage then an AoE sleep is actually quite useful.
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My problem with Time Bomb is that it's not an interesting power to use. It's got a 9 second cast time and a 15 second delay. That means a total of 24 seconds from when I press cast until the boom. I would MUCH rather spend those 24 seconds doing something more interesting than placing a time bomb and waiting for it to detonate. In the same time frame I could use FA, Flamethrower and Buckshot then start on mopping up the bosses.
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Quote:It's definitely an interesting idea but I think balance would be an issue. Let's assume for the sake of an argument that the blasts are replaced by buff/debuff powers from an appropriate set (i.e. Mercs get Traps/Devices, Ninjas get Trick Arrow, Zombies get Dark Maisma, Bots get Force Field, Demons get Thermal, Thugs get ummm something).For your second idea, it might work, but your secondary sets would need to powers to make up for the ranged attacks that the summon sets get. What would you propose for those?
Now the blasts are a more prominent part of the character so it would need to have a higher damage mod (say 0.85, more than corruptors but less than blasters). Would that be balanced or would it be necessary to reduce the power of the pets. If the pets are weakened to balance it would they still be useful espeially given that it would have fewer support powers? -
The old version of CoD is no longer updated, however the link I sent you is the new version which is still being maintained (at least to some degree, it's not 100% up to date).
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I have three pieces of advice:
1. Set your LFG tag and comment appropriately
2. Find and join LFG global channels
3. Start your own teams
1 and 2 make it easier for you to find existing teams. Using broadcast will occasionally get you a team but the search feature and global channels are cross zone which drastically increases the number of people who could potentially invite you.
3 is of course the best way to make sure you always have a team. Plenty of people want teams but don't want to have to start one so if you start one and fill it using some combination of broadcast, searches and global channels you'll find plenty of people willing to sign up. Someone wrote a good guide on how to form teams, I'm to lazy to look it up but I imagine someone will post a link to it soon. -
As a general point, once you out-level an origin contact they should give you a new contact if you go and talk to them, even if you're never done a mission. If they are telling you to go and talk to the AE person then it means that either they think you already have a level appropriate contect or they aren't one of your contacts.
So if you need a new contact the trick is to look at your active contacts list and go talk to someone who is a) in the main city (i.e. not one of the zone contacts) and b) isn't a special contact (the AE manager or university instructor). Talking to one of the contacts there should give you either a mission or a new contact. If your level is a multiple of 5 then they will generally ask you to do a mission or two before giving you a new contact but if you've completly outleveled them they should do it automatically.
Red Tomax has an explanation of how it works:
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/contacts/coh.php -
Red Tomax has it all:
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...etype.php?at=4
In general the advantage of Dual Pistols is that it offers three different types of damage mitigation (knockback, slow and -damage) and no other blast set offers -damage. However to balance this the debuffs are weaker than in other sets. -
Quote:It would be flat out to weak. The original version of Blasters demonstrated that a Damage/Damage AT just doesn't have the suvivability. Additionally an Assault/Melee or Assault/Ranged AT would break the rule that no character should have access to two copies of the same power.So the sets are too different than what the blaster gets. So then do you think a archetype that gets Spinsrimary and Thorns:secondary could make for a balanced archetype? or would some re-working of one of the sets need to happen? Or would it flat out be too powerful?
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Quote:The odds of either of those getting directly ported to blasters are pretty much nil. Spines is a Melee damage set and Thorns is an Assault set neither of which are used by blasters. In order to get an appropriate blaster you'd actually need two new sets: Thorn Blast and Plant Manipulation.Okay, so all I need to do with WAIT for thron and spin proliferation XD
Thorn Blast would take the appropriate powers from Thorny Assault (the three ST ranged attacks, Aim and Fling Thorns) and would then need 3 or 4 new powers to fill it out, probably a nuke, a stun, a targeted AoE (which could maybe be Thorn Burst) and something else (traditionally the last power is a snipe, but IMHO that doesn't really fit with the theme).
Plant Manipulation would primarily draw from Plant Control and the melee attacks in Spines/Thorny Assault (with the Thorn based names and animations to fit with the theme) plus I'd definitely include Thorntrops. The Plant Control powers would really need to be reanimated in order to avoid redraw with the spines powers.
So anyway it could be done but it's not as simple as just proliferating the sets, it's basically two new sets that have some powers/animations in common with Thorns, Plants and Spines. -
Quote:There is ONE situation where an Empath is significantly more useful than basically any other Defender: Hamidon Raids. The nature of the raid means that defensively the only buffs/debuffs that work are healing and regen buffs.Yeah, I can't think of many instances in the game where an empathy defender is needed but any flavor of defender or support-specced controller (i.e. probably not fire/kin) won't suffice. ITF? Don't need a healer. STF? Nope. DKTF? Just need -regen. Random AV/GM run? +Def/Res, -Damage does just fine. Farm? Fire/kins are supposed to solo it, that's what makes it a farm.
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I agree in theory. The balance between the different sets is pretty bad and the balance between buff/debuff ATs and the other ATs is pretty off as well. That being said the changes required to really balance it would amount to pretty much re-balancing almost all powers from the ground up which isn't really practical.
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Quote:It depends a lot on the magnitude of the boost and which blast set it's paired with. In general the range of a power is not particularly critical, most blasts have a range of 80ft and since range is of very limited utility as a defense anyway this is more than sufficient. The main exception is cone attacks where extra range makes it easier to target saturate the cone. For example, one of the reasons AR/Energy is a popular combo is that it has two 40ft cone powers and boost range turns them into 63.8ft cones (it also turns Full Auto into a 127.7ft cone which is convenient but less of an enhancement). Sonic also has three cones (with slightly longer and narrower arcs) but these are outliers, most blast sets have one or none (and before someone jumps in with Dual Pistols, for the purposes of this discussion Piercing Rounds doesn't count since it's long range and narrow arc mean it doesn't really benefit from the increase range in the way that other sets do).range boost would be kinda neat...but it'd really kinda be flavor wouldnt it?
Now a 20% range bonus is equivalent to a single SO and would turn a 40ft cone into a 48ft cone. It would be a nice bonus, not really game changing even for the cone-heavy sets (AR, Sonic and Dark if it ever gets ported). Speaking from experience I found that when I used the Damage/Range enhancement form Positron's Blast (which gives a 16% range bonus) I didn't really notice the difference and ended up switching it for the proc to get more damage. -
My preference is to select teammates with the mouse and then bind the buff/heal powers to the thumb keys on my mouse.
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I would argue that it actually has three with the third being to hit buffs. A few enemies with very high to hit buffs (notably quartz pets and the ralaruu eye thingies) have enough to hit buff to render the FF defense buffs almost useless.
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There is no AT that combines Melee and Assault sets and it is VERY unlikely we will ever see one. Back in the original beta for CoX Blasters were Blast/Melee ATs but the devs changed it when they realized that the combo just did not work. Characters need something to mitigate incoming damage so Blasters got changed from Ranged/Melee to Ranged/Manipulation with "Manipulation" being loosely defined as a mishmash of Melee, Control and Support powers.
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If you don't have fly/hover bring a raptor pack with at least half an hours fuel. If you have a taunt/damage aura turn it off and don't use Phantom Army. Bring some wakies (any size) and break frees (preferably medium or large ones) but don't fill up your inventory, you'll need room to gather EoEs. Speaking of EoEs, unless you are a Tank or Scrapper give them away, the only time you're likely to take much damage is during the retreat portions and it doesn't matter to much if you die then (someone will TP you and rez you eventually).
Quote:-What's the most desired AT - I have a stable of 50s to choose from?
Quote:-What's the best AT for a raid newb to be on, if different from above?
Quote:-Do we gather IN the Hive, or in Eden, then enter Hive as a group? Leandro said at the "Safe Rock" - will it be obvious where that is?
Quote:-How do I make sure I don't end up embarrasing myself in there?
Quote:Great, StarGeek & Schismatrix thx - what about AT - my current fave is an Ill/Kin 'troller - will that be useful? Or I could go with a full-on Healing Defender. Or my Archery Blaster is pretty tricked-out. I think center-stage Tank would be a bad idea for a first-timer.