Adeon Hawkwood

There's a Boomtown map used in the Kahn TF Blueside.

It doesn't need a carrot, it has enough of one already. It just needs something to make it more interesting. The current respec trial (blueside at least) is extremely boring. The initial setup is decent but the reactor room fight (the climax of the trial) basically consists of sitting there for half an hour occasionally fighting a few enemies. It's really easy but the enemies are on a timer so it takes just over 30 minutes for that fight no matter what you do.

QFT. Once you hit the mid twenties people just don't take that much damage on good teams. A bit of healing is sometimes needed but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Buffing the team and more importantly the right people on the team is what keeps the team alive. Fortitude is a very powerful Defense and Damage buff. Adrenalin Boost is a huge Recharge Boost for one of your team members. One of my pet peeves is Empaths who save AB until someone nukes and then use it to refill someone's blue bar after a nuke. Sure it works for that but it's much better to use it when most of the current spawn isn't already dead.

Blackstar is an Excellent debuff. It will floor the to hit chance of most enemies with no slotting (you need some slotting if you fight higher levels). If your enemies can't hit then you have no need for endurance. In any case the basic idea is to cast Blackstar, eat a blue then use Dark Consumption on the survivors. If you but a single end mod enhancement in it then 3 enemies will fill you up and 2 will pretty much fill you (especially when you factor in the 25end from the blue).

Yes they have, unfortunatly the release of the new mission settings coincided with the fixing of a bug that was causing level 50s to earn about half as much Inf as they should. So while the supply increased it didn't increase enough to counter the increased earning power of level 50s.

Yep, presumably the reasoning behind it is that the EATs are very story focused and starting in Preatoria means you miss out on that.

But that is still requiring certain Defenders to play in a way that isn't the optimal. Sure there are times when spamming Web Grenades is the right thing to do but on a lot of teams the debuffs are unnecessary and I'm better off blasting. Also, what about Radiation Defenders? They have basically one power (Radiant Aura) that is not a toggle, doesn't require a dead ally and has a recharge less than 90seconds. You're basically forcing them to spam the heal aura. The inherent powers should work best when a character is doing what they were designed to do, this does that for some types of defenders where alternating primary and secondary is sensible but for a lot of other Defenders it encourages poor play.

I think you do have a point with Controllers but not Corruptors. At lower levels Defenders do a LOT more damage than Controllers since as you say a lot of their damage is in their EPPs and Pets. At higher levels I think Defenders do still tend to out-damage controllers (with the obvious exception of Fire/Kin) but not by a whole lot.

I think that Corruptors and Defenders are better balanced. Roughly speaking Defender buffs are about 13% to 33% better than Corruptor ones while Corruptors do about 15% more damage (neglecting Scourge). In team play I find they are reasonably balanced against each other. Defenders buff the team a little bit more while Corruptors do slightly more damage. The big difference is Scourge, but if you think about it, Scourge helps a lot more whilst soloing than it does in team play. Soloing you will spend time shooting at every single enemy whilst it is at less than half health (unless you one hit kill them anyway) so you have a chance to Scourge with every enemy. On a team though you won't get to shoot every enemy while they are at half health. In other words, Scourge provides a damage buff that scales down with team size.

I don't see it as a teaming inherent versus a non-teaming inherent I see it as an issue of ATs being multiplicative versus additive. When you add a character to the team you are increasing the team's overall power no matter what AT the character is. However some ATs increase the individual power of their teammates (multiplicative) while others don't (additive).

Characters like Blasters and Scrappers who are strongly additive will automatically be good soloers since their solo capabilities are the same as their team capabilities. Multiplicative ATs are definitely giving up some personal power for the ability to increase their teammate's power so how well they solo can vary radically. Tanks and Controllers are decent soloers, they are slower than Blasters and Scrappers but they are reasonably well protected while soloing so it balances out somewhat (obviously some combos are better or worse than others).

Defenders though are all over the place in terms of soloing ability. Debuff based sets like Traps, Trick Arrow and Rad can use most of their primary powers at full effect while soloing so while they aren't as good at the additive ATs are at soloing like the Tankers and controllers they can at least use their powers effectively to help themselves. Other sets like Empathy have few powers that they can use themselves whilst soloing and so have to rely on a small subset of their powers.

Now multiplicative ATs don't have to be bad soloers to balance their team based abilities. As I mentioned above Corruptor's scourge decreases in utility somewhat as the team gets larger. Similarly one of the advantages Controllers have over Defenders is that with sets that focus on buffing teammates the Defender gets little benefit while solo but the Controller can (generally) use them to buff his pets. This effectively increases his power while solo but the advantage fades away on teams (since buffing teammates tends to take priority over buffing pets).

Tanks are probably the other AT that could use a boost. Like Defenders they don't have anything that scales up whilst solo and unlike Defenders they aren't completely multiplicative on teams either. The first one is but the nature of the game meas that one Tank is usually sufficient for aggro management and a second is therefore only additive. Their advantage is that there is a lot less variation between powersets. Sure, some are better soloers and some are better on teams but they can all use their powers to pretty much the same extent regardless of whether they are solo or teamed.

Personally if I was an MMO designer I would endeavor to make all classes multiplicative with a similar mix of powers that scale up or down based on team size but I'm not sure how practical that would really be.


EDIT: Just as a thought, there has been a lot of talk about whether Defenders will be played less with Going Rogue in favor of Corruptors. I think they will somewhat but I think the reason is not that team leaders will kick Defenders in favor of Corruptors but that players will choose to make new characters Corruptors because they solo a lot better. To some extent we see the same thing now, Controllers tend to be more popular because they are perceived as more powerful. However I think that a lot of that perception comes not from team play but from solo play.

Unfortunately Villains only have one starting zone. You get a choice of two different contacts but they are both in the same zone. Once you get a few levels (level 5 I think) you can go to Port Oakes and meet a Broker who will open up Newspaper missions for you. If you do 3 newspaper missions you'll get a Mayhem Mission which is basically a Bank Robbery set in one of the Hero Zones (specifically Atlas Park). This is one of the two ways to get a Raptor Pack which will allow to to fly for a total duration of two hours (more than enough to last until you get a travel power of your own assuming you don't waste it).

Slightly off topic but I love the Buff Banner. Especially if you can coordinate with an uber medic push. Pure carnage.

The worst part is that he can communicate Telepathically with Azuria but the git is to good to talk to US telepathically. Personally if it were me I'd eliminate at least two of the three kill all's at the start (or even all three) and get rid of the side plot where you go back to Paragon City to recover the keys. That would decrease the length of the TF to something a bit more manageable without killing the plot.

I say: Insufficient Data

but probably true

Actually the Red Tomax enhancement listings ALWAYS say the target is the caster for procs, this is because the caster is technically the target of the enhancement. The detailed information on the right where it actually tells you who it actually affects. As you say the Panacea proc says it affects the "Target" so it shouldn't heal you if you put it in Dark Regen.

Weird. I don't think it was the SSK system though. I did a raid a few days ago with the level 41 scrapper and he got merits just fine when SSK'd to 49.

No the reason Brutes didn't get Ice armor was that Chilling Embrace (their main Taunt aura) has a hefty dose of -Rech which limited their ability to gain fury (especially when Ice Armor was paired with Ice Melee). As several people stated Brutes just need to get attacked to build fury, they don't need to get hit. If they did then the other defense based sets would also have serious Fury problems.

Yeah, this is something that always amuses me. When people say they can do really high difficulty they almost always mean against either one of the easier enemy groups or against a custom AE group that is specifically designed to be weak to their strengths and strong to their weaknesses and/or using buff bots.

I'd be a lot more impressed by someone who could solo +3x8 against Ralaruu than I would someone who can do Council at the same difficulty. As I said a long time ago in another thread. If you find the game to easy there are plenty of ways to make it harder. No matter how good your character is you can either find or make an enemy group that will make him cry like a little girl.


Also on topic, a slightly amusing case of Defender tanking. I was on a really weird ITF team last night with my Traps Defender. We were having a bit of trouble doing enough damage to Rommy to counter the Healing Nictus so decided to taunt it off. The team didn't have a Tank and the two Scrappers were both Willpower. So I ended up taunting the healing nictus off by the simple expedient of shooting it a few times.

In terms of the no merits thing, are you certain you have the Member of Vanguard badge?

Ah, good to know.

It's important to understand that as far as the game is concerned Knockdown and Knockback are both the same effect, in game terms Knockdown is just Knockback with a magnitude less than 1. So protection to one will cause protection to the other. I think that potentially adding Resistance would work since it would convert the Knockback to Knockdown (by lowering the magnitude) without noticeably impacting the Knockdown although I'm not certain about that.

I don't particularly care for the idea for the same reasons that have been discussed to death in pretty much every knockback thread ever .