Zem

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Perspective. It's what's for dinner.

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I myself am no farmer and where exactly the line is drawn won't directly affect me either. I DO however, think it would be good for the game and everyone in it if there was an earning rate cap. It's a backstop against future exploits and it prevents knee-jerk reactions like this from devs under pressure to "do something" while 50s are practically coming off an assembly-line.

I don't know if I've ever had a character of any kind power their way through the upper teens. Mob hit points in this range seem to be scaling up faster than my damage output and endurance recovery can handle, so it usually becomes a grind of frequent rest-stops.

But my easiest lowbies bar none *have* involved either rad blast or rad emission (or both). Especially now with vet attacks. It's a bit less dramatic now that there's beginner's luck to alleviate the really low-level accuracy doldrums, but by the high teens and until SOs you start to need some help there stilll.

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Ugh, another "Tell us where the line is" thread?

I'll just say the same thing I've said before in far fewer words.

They're not going to tell us.

Deal with it.

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"Ugh... another side-switching thread. They're never going to allow it! Deal with it!"

Sound familiar? I know I've heard it before. Maybe what you should "deal with" is that when people don't like something, they talk about it on the forums. And sometimes things change as a result. I can tell you one thing that has never changed anything on any game forum I've ever been on though:

The sanctimonious, "All you peope stop whining already!" post. But seriously, keep trying. I'm sure it will work one day.

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Just thought I would toss Thermal on the flames with my frustrations with it since in my mind, it already was Empathy for villains, people just ignored it because it didn't say "It's Dark Empathy."

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Thermal was certainly thought of as the "healer" set for Villains, but I wouldn't say it was much of an Empathy equivalent (or dare call either a "healer" set here myself ) They are different enough. Pain Dom is closer to Empathy, which was the point I guess. It does its buffs a little differently but they are mostly the same effects and like Empathy it has no shields.

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What they really should do is not just specify a limit, but code that into the game engine.

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You'd think they would have by now. But then their doing that presumes a lot of truth about what is actually an exploit and what isn't

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Not really. It makes that almost irrelevant. The devs just have to decide what the upper limit of earning rate for each type of reward should be (and it's not like they couldn't adjust it as they felt necessary going forward). Doesn't matter how you get there. Also doesn't mean they wouldn't continue to eliminate certain loopholes. Even with a cap in place, reaching that cap easily and without any risk is probably something you want to deal with still. But it's not a disaster in progress like we had, where the devs were forced to act quickly.

Had Comm Officer farming happened with such a limit in place there'd be no talk of banning anyone and they'd have had plenty of time to just deal with it at the next opportunity. There might still have been crowds farming MA just because it was easier, but no one would be hitting 50 in a matter of hours or pouring obscene amounts of tickets into the economy.

I know what you mean. Until recently I spent most of my time redside. Then I found myself standing on a beach in PI one day looking around thinking something was wrong with it. I couldn't put my finger on it right away but it eventually dawned on me.

There was no garbage littering the sand. No empty oil drums, discarded tires, broken crates washed up on the shore, etc.

Boring!

No but if you enable the log so that it saves to a file you get timestamped ticks. You'll see two damage reports marked with the same timestamp. One being the normal damage and one being the Scourge. You also want to be sure you're NOT spamming the power and overlapping effects or it will be difficult to tell them apart.

If you have a log showing the Scourge stopping halfway through on a single application of Tenebrous Tentacles, for example, then I'd say PM that to Castle straight away.

edit: On second thought, if there IS a bug here, it's more likely to be related to firing off additonal attacks while a scourging DoT is in progress. I wonder what happens if you fire a DoT that begins scourging then fire another attack that fails to Scourge. Will the DoT stop scourging midway too?

Just a guess.

What they really should do is not just specify a limit, but code that into the game engine. If it were not possible to earn more than X amount of a certain reward per minute then much of the "farmers/powergamers are ruining it for everyone else by causing nerfs" complaining just goes away. Who cares if you can exploit a particular feature of AE if you don't *need* to to hit the earning-rate cap? They could even tighten down that cap a little more in AE missions to encourage farmers to do their farming away from AE, if that's what they want.

It also removes the urgency of dealing with those exploits promptly and gives them more time to more carefully consider and implement changes if the forums aren't currently burning down with DOOM over the latest problem.

Casual gamers would never hit this cap. Wouldn't even worry that it's there. You'd have to farm to bump up against it consistently, but the level would be, of course, far less than what was seen in the current Comm Officer farm mess.

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Well, first of all while the stated reason for changing Empathy to Pain Domination was to make it more villanous, we don't KNOW what the reasons were for adding self damage boosts to that set. Is it "villanous" to have a self damage boost? Kin has self damage boosts, and it is not considered "villanous". Therefore we can conclude that while they changed the "feel" of the set to make it fit the goal of being more suitable for villains, they added specific features, like the +dam -- to the caster even, and not to the team -- to make the set more balanced and resolve issues with that had been reported with Empathy.

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When proliferation was announced and people naturally began asking how far it would go the devs didn't call out Force Field as a problem. In fact until this very thread I've never even heard the theory that FF might not be suitable for villains, for the obvious reason that villains already have access to it. They mentioned, as I recall, only Empathy for Villains and Poison for Heroes as likely to "never be proliferated in their current form".

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In fact, they could have made Pain Domination an exact clone of Empathy, only changing the names and the power effects. The idea that they wanted Pain Domination to have a "villanous" concept does not mean they had to change the implementation.

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By the same token they could have just added the +DMG, as you say, without having to darken the overall theme with the names and power descriptions they chose. It's just as plausible to conclude that this is what they were after and simply thought that it would be lame merely to give the set a new "skin".

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Second, I am not suggesting that they change Force Field for Corruptors without changing it for Defenders, and in fact I'd rather they did not. I am actually suggesting that the devs will introduce changes to Force Field BEFORE they Proliferate it to Corruptors, in order to address those problems.

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And I'm saying don't hold your breath. There is zero buzz about FF except in this very thread. No one cares. It's not getting touched. Believe what you want.

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The second you state where the line between 'exploit' and 'fine' is, people will dance on that line and work ever harder on maximizing their rewards as much as possible while stating that you told them it was fine the entire time.

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Why is this a problem? Do they have speed limits on the roads where you live? Do people drive right up to those limits? Is this a problem? If so, do you believe the solution to that problem is removing speed limits from all the roads?

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The line's blurry specifically to catch people trying to play at the edge, because those people are more likely to actually exploit.

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Why is this better than specifying a limit and then not having to ban anyone? Specify the harm that is done by someone performing AT the specified limit in such a way that the problem is not, in fact, with WHERE the limit has been set or how it has been implemented.

If you can.

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bring a rad

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Obviously, but if you debuff his resistance, it doesn't change the relationship in effectiveness of s/l attacks vs. anything else you might throw at him. Psi, of course, still wins.

How much will he resist debuffs though? Is that bugged too or is it fairly normal for an AV? It's fairly common I see no damage reports from sword attacks and fairly uncommon for me to be on teams with no debuffs.

100% to everything sounds like a bug. 100% to smash/lethal just sounds like the usual "LOL Smashing/Lethal" the devs seem to enjoy. When he hits unstop and I'm playing my Ninja Blade stalker, I usually just kick back and spam Dark Blast and Soul Storm for next to nothing damage... which I suppose is better than literally nothing damage.

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I suspect we will see Force Field perhaps altered into a similar set with some damage boosts, much like Empathy became Pain Domination, before it makes it to Corruptors.

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Why would they do this? First off, Empathy was turned into Pain Dom because the devs said the "concept" of Empathy was not villainous. This wasn't about self-damage boosts or team-friendliness. Villains already have powersets that are majority ally-only. This was about empathy being too touchy-feely nicey-nicey for villainside.

I assume that reasoning is out the window with Going Rogue. If you can bring an Emp Def or FF Def redside now than you are saying that person, with that powerset, can be a villain. So why would you go to the trouble now of changing FF for Corruptors, that being the case?

All that aside, I have never heard of FF as having this "stigma" of not being villainous before. The only powerset I've heard labeled as such was Empathy (which is also inaccurate considering the actual meaning of the word "empathy" but it nevertheless *does* have that popular impression as being "heroic" or "selfless" or whatever).

I think FF and Empathy defenders will be quite welcomed redside. I *know* the Hamidon raiders are going to love it. They need to get Warburg nukes for their +regen currently because the devs stiffed redside on Empathy.

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Yeah I tried redtomax but it didn't show the defense numbers for stealth or maneuvers. It had some error.

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His scripting is occasionally a little glitchy. It looks like right now when you click on a power pool power, it's not properly selecting the archetype. The drop-down menu defaults to Blaster but the effects are shown with SQL errors. Using that drop-down menu just above the effects list for the power, select your AT (or if you DID want to look at Blaster numbers, select a different AT and then select Blaster again). Sometimes this works and the effects are shown correctly.

edit: Scooped!

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That's what I'm saying, though. Toxic Dart deals only toxic damage, and you claimed that attacks that only deal toxic are only typed positionally with regards to defense, except Toxic Dart has both Ranged and Lethal typing.

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Okay, I see it now. I'm having another "senior moment" apparently. Stupid brain.

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Unfortunately, he's trying to call you out on saying that they'll ONLY have positional. The Toxic Dark is also typed Lethal in addition to Ranged while only doing toxic damage.

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I didn't say Toxic Darts did only toxic damage. I said "attacks that deal only toxic damage" have only positional type. The second sentence of my post does not refer to Toxic Darts, hence the reference to Acid Arrow, an entirely different power that DOES only have toxic damage.

Guess the wording could have been better.

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And if I recall right, Vahzilok poison darts are typed LETHAL, not Toxic for defense.

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There is no toxic defense type. Attacks that deal ONLY toxic damage will have just a positional type wrt/defense.

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Care to revise your statement?

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I was pointing out that the dart wasn't typed for toxic defense because there IS no toxic defense type. That's correct. I also mentioned another attack, Acid Arrow, that ONLY does toxic damage and therefore has no damage attack-type defense at all. Only positional. That's also correct.

So... no. No revision. Thanks for asking though.

I've just started one. Best thing about it so far is Nemesis Staff and Sands of Mu hitting 95% of the time.

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No, armor toggles are cheap. Debuff toggles, not necesarily. Go check out Mud Pots and Arctic Air. I've never played a stormie, but I bet Tornado has similar end use.

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Hurricane, I think you mean, is about 0.66eps unslotted. Still less than most clicks which are typically 0.9eps or more if used every time they are available during combat. AA is more, you're right, but again only about as expensive as spamming an attack and probably less so if you are talking about a build that adds global recharge, allowing you to burn end even faster with clicks.

You can find some exceptions but generally speaking toggles ARE cheap. It's not that they are not an issue. Loading up six toggles will cost significant endurance. So would six attacks in an attack chain. It's up to the player to decide if they are getting their endurance-point's worth for each power they are running.

In the post I was responding to, the implication is that even with a lot of recovery he's still runnning out and it's *because* of the toggles. It isn't. All the toggles he mentioned together are using less than half his available recovery.

It's pretty common advice on these forums to two or even three-slot toggles for end reduction if they are considered "endurance hogging" toggles. Take those same slots and put them in your attacks instead and you might be surprised, is all I am saying.

I wouldn't stress about overkill with Scourge. As Starsman pointed out in his excellent analysis of Scourge, *everybody* overkills by some amount on the killing blow. It's just more common with Scourge. Despite that, Scourge still provides a significant benefit to Corruptors easily on par with other inherents like Scrapper criticals. Better in some cases. Worse in others. But nothing to sneeze at.

You're right about some misconceptions concerning DoTs. I remember seeing someone say how well Full Auto "leveraged" Scourge and I could only assume that person was confused about how things work. They don't play particularly well with Scourge unless they are pet-summon DoTs. Just the way things work. I doubt even the benefit that pet-summon DoTs get was intentional so much as a result of how things already worked before Corruptors were even invented. I wouldn't hold my breath for this to change any time soon.

If it's any consolation, Gloom gets slightly better total damage to offset the fact that it deals that damage more slowly than a burst power.

Are you saying Fly Trap is.... bugged!?

But seriously, I am guessing both of those examples are not exactly "working as intended".

Okay, I reread a little and I see what you're responding to. It's not fair to say AR doesn't go well with Kin because of survivability. It's fair to say the combo doesn't offer much survivability and leave it up to the person asking about builds to decide whether they care about that or not.

Redraw is a valid complaint though. Kinetics is a very active set, assuming you are using the Siphons, and since redraw times are no longer included in AR"s animation times, Kinetics pays a heavier penalty than most as does anyone who needs to do a lot of clicking in their secondary, usually.

Then again, it's not like Kinetics doesn't make it all back up and then some when you finally draw the rifle with THAT much damage buffing behind it.

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AR/Kin ftw. A lot of forumites will look at it and go 'ewww' because they base everything on solo ability in an MMO - which is retarded for the corr class.

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Soloable doesn't mean "bad on teams". /Dark, /Rad, and /Storm are all good soloers AND good on teams. Soloable also means you don't fold like a lawn-chair when the team gets into trouble, which is anything but "retarded".

The way I see it, if whatever it is you are doing is going to be easier and/or more rewarding for the team if you kick said person, then kick away. TFs are a bit different. While I agree that I don't owe people my time, in general, joining a TF is a bit of an agreement to stick with it. A bit. If someone is making things impossible or turning a 2 hour TF into a 4 hour TF, then again, kick away.

Otherwise even underperforming teammates can still be useful as padding for spawn sizes or as target dummies for the enemy.