Techbot Alpha

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I want to prove someone right. I got this negative rep yesterday:



Of all the responses I could thing to give to that, one above all seems to fit the best: No! Really?

Originally Posted by Gaia

Hint. - GW was caught! - you have fought her before I presume so have some idea how hard that can be so why would you not expect something tough to guard her - I expected an AV the first time I ran it and was presently surprised to find only a Ballista.

I remember the first time I did this and couldn't believe how easy it was running on top difficulty. GW just tore through the mobs but that was on my Dark/Dark corrupter so DN on the Ballista probably made a huge difference.
That bears up on later runs - my Widow which should have been able to handle it easily was two shotted by the Ballista - Hosp and reset before it failed. The repeat attempt downed the Ballista but on low health and GW down to about half then she got hit by the Wardens.
The heroside version otoh can be very nasty - I couldn't take her on my tank as it went - hit her once - HELD, click BF, DEAD. A trayload of purples allowed me to get her down to about 1/2 health before she got the lucky hits in - then quickly dead with her on full health.

Ballistas are very definitely soloable without having to rely on temp pets and there are plenty of arcs where you come across them. The hardest I had was with my Fire/Fire Brute before he had any KB protection where he couldn't get the self heals off so died very quickly but my Corrupter, various Doms and even my petless MM have taken them down solo with varying degrees of difficulty.
Indeed there are many other EBs that are much harder to solo - mostly the downgraded AVs/Heroes.

Rikti Magi also spawn in some RWZ mishes so not just on the ship and they are also soloable - bring BFs if you're playing a squishy.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

If we DO get a new bashing weapon set, I'd like it to be a two-handed giant hammer, wielded sort of like how the Carnival Strongmen wield theirs.

Originally Posted by Zombie Man

Oh, cruel irony.

That's the old wiki. The one abandoned because they would allow ads for Real Money Traders (the gold farmers who spam our in-game email) and is now maintained by the puppets of those RMTers.

Please use: http://paragonwiki.com

Originally Posted by Neo Shadowdream

Jerk!

For those wondering.... write down the underlined letters

Originally Posted by Archon099

I would have to agree with Memphis Bill on this one. Even if you don't tier the travel powers and make them all available at 6, if you do your first and second Mayhem/Safeguard missions, you'll have Fly and SJ powers that will last you for quite a while. My characters rarely pick up a travel power at 14 anymore and sometimes put it off until their 20s just because I had those temporary ones still working. Just gotta use them conservatively. And I'd end up getting them around lvl 6 anyway.

The main problem I have with this is that generally they have tried to make the pools pretty balanced already and have done so rather well. By having different powers that do different things split into themed pools like this (instead of putting all the attacks in one pool and all the defensive moves in another), they have allowed us to not need to take quite as many pools. If I want my controller to be capable of close combat, I can get Air Superiority with my Fly travel power and not have to get two different pools (Travel and Offense). I can also get Boxing/Kick and Tough and not need to get an Offense set and a Defense set to push my total pools up to three. It's risking the chance to break what we already have working fine and potentially screw up a lot of heroes/villains powers. Good intentions, to be sure, but I just feel it wouldn't accomplish as much positive as negative in the end.

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That being said, I have an idea for the pools.

Add more options in the pools.

Pools have 4 options each. Patron/Epic Pools have been increased to provide more functionality, but not the normal pools.

For example:

Teleport:
1. Recall Friend (Lvl 6)
2. Teleport Foe (Lvl 6)
3. Warp Strike (Lvl 6)
4. Teleport (Lvl 14)
5. Team Teleport (Lvl 20)
6. Rift Jumping (Lvl 20)

Since the other travel pools have an attack move, I thought TP could too. I pictured this move working kind of like a short ranged blast attack, but using melee damage multipliers. You click when within a range of maybe the short ranged blast moves like Cosmic Burst, and your character warps in really fast, attacks, and warps back to their previous position. The secondary effect could be an accuracy improvement over the other pool attacks since you are catching them off-guard.

I also thought adding a final move with some defensive capabilities would be interesting too, since some of the other travel sets have them. Rift Jumping could be a way to avoid an attack by teleporting. Make it a click buff like Build Up, short duration but nice effect. Make it so when activated, your character will disappear when struck, causing the attack to miss, and you will be invisible and phased. After a few seconds or when you next attack, you will reappear in your current location. How it could play out is that the enemy is charging you and you click Rift Jumping. They swing and you disappear. You run a few yards away (travel powers should be suppressed for it to keep it from being overpowered) and shoot back, causing you to reappear. As far as they are concerned, you vanished and appeared behind them, never got hit, and shot back. Some would say this one-time avoidance thing would be dumb, but used right this could make you rather slippery. Not sure what the recharge and all would be on a move like this, but I don't see a minute or 1.5 minutes being unreasonable. Even a melee class would get the benefit of fully avoiding a move, if not also the potential to either run or get a stun in next.

Other pools could do this too. The Flight pool could have a move like "Favorable Wind" that helps team endurance recovery for a short time. Leaping could have a move like "Into the Fray" that will be like Shield Charge, but with a knockdown effect only and no damage. Make the character's movement an arc instead of a straight line and you'd have an effective "dive into the fight" style move. The Speed pool could have a "Counterattack" move. It could be a temporary click buff that causes you to strike the opponent with half damage whenever you are hit, for a short time. There could be a streaky animation of your character, like with Shield Charge, that zooms over and back whenever you are attacked, and the person gets hurt. I figure it could last for a short time like Build Up. Ok, so half damage might be a bit much, considering you could have ten NPCs attacking the tank; for him to activate such a move, that would be crazy powerful, so perhaps just a base damage upon being hit would be better, but I digress. I mainly mean to point out possible additions to the thematic pools that exist.

I'm by no means saying this should be done 100% as I suggested, but merely that having more diverse options in our pools would be great. I'm sure my ideas for new moves would need some balancing, but the general concept I think not only fits the pool, but can be used by most classes just fine while still providing a thematically relevant but new twist on the power set.

Originally Posted by Crim_the_Cold

Kind of like getting Faultline or Fusionette to team with you.

Originally Posted by King_Moloch

Thing is, I believe they are designed this way on purpose. There is really no AT that can benefit from as many different IO set bonus combinations and use them to shine as drastically as a PB, WS or any character with the Energy Defense/Armor set.

I think they were designed to be utter crap until you have the eight or nine billion infamy to pump into them to make them shine.

Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper

Because lethal (and smashing) are easy to justify critters having resistance to; they're simple physical trauma, and just about any sort of armoring will afford some protection from that.

You could always go farm Carnies

Originally Posted by Raithnor_Mal

Doesn't that seem like an excessive use of slots though? Flying, Jumping, and Super-speed need at most 2-3 slots to be really workable as a Travel power. I find two good speed IOs fast enough to the point where I can barely control it.

Teleport need close to four slot just to be usable to go from one end of the Zone to the other an not run out of slots.

I've used all four modes of travel, even using super-speed in grandville and never really run into issues with NPCs I don't want to fight. Of the four, teleport is the most END intensive though.

Originally Posted by Scientist_16

Related aside: My Katana Scrapper has a macro'd taunt that quotes Sigfried from Soul Calibur upon victory. "I avoided your vitals. You'll live."

Originally Posted by Crazy_Dragon

***********************est

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

So germane to this post, I'm running my Peacebringer through one of these terrible arcs that Memphis Bill tells me is supposed to be better than the VEAT arcs and here is the flimsy justification Sunstorm gives me for having to clear yet another map of Council:

"If the Council knows what we're looking for, they're likely to alter or destroy the decryption key. So you had better arrest every villain in the place, to keep them guessing about our true intent."

/drop mission
/logoff - Since that mission was pure filler and he now wants me to go after a defector, probably on another damn Council map!

All this in service to letting the heroes know that "Nictus are bad". Umm... dude, the heroes and villains whip Nictus behind 20 times a day in Cim. We get it. Darn, these Kheldians arc suck!