Arcanaville

Actually, I use Mids.

That's basically it. But its the specifics that are tricky. I think high resistance is going to unlock a huge amount of survivability for the absorb shields. They are stronger than the regen sustains. For example, Frigid Protection shows 60.24 Absorb per tick. Real Numbers isn't good with showing the activation period but I believe Arbiter Hawk stated it was going to be 3 seconds per Absorb tick. So that's 5% every 3 seconds, fully slottable to 10% every 3 seconds. That's 3.33%/sec of damage mitigation. *IF* you could use it all, that would be equivalent to 800% regeneration. Compare to, say, Force of Thunder which has a +250% regen buff half-enhanceable. So fully slotted that would be about +375% regen, or 1.56%/sec.

*IF* you can use it all, you could have double the mitigation of the +regen sustains, something approaching Regen scrapper mitigation. *BUT* its very difficult to use it all, because Absorb is a use it or lose it mechanism. Whatever you don't use in one 3 second tick you can't carry forward. Its gone, and a new fully charged tick replaces it.

Since defense makes damage more bursty, it will tend to reduce the efficiency of Absorb. Resistance evens out damage, making it increase the efficiency of Absorb. There's no such thing as an apples to apples comparison with Def and Res in the real game because you never get that choice, but the Def has traditionally been the better play because you can get more of it and it mitigates secondary effects and not just damage. But if Resistance can unlock more of Absorb than defense, that might reduce the gap between the two substantially, because Resistance has a lot of upside on an Absorb toggle.

I slot mine with Contagious Confusion and Chance for Disorient.

Its possible there are a few in there where I was typing, but not necessarily present to read them. Heck I did the back half of a Positron while asleep once.

This sounds like you're saying "meaningful" mez protection is up all the time protection, but I don't believe that to be true. Being able to break mez periodically or truncating a mez significantly with protection after the fact is extremely valuable to nearly all blaster players.

You could give him a job on the vfx team, and then we all win.

Because you'll just smudge it with the side of your hand.

Actually, the way Arbiter Hawk described the thought process to me the intent was to ensure that every secondary received the sustain buff at about the same time, and definitely before SOs arrive and the game steps up. Level 20 coincidentally contained just the right power for a sustain effect except energy manipulation whose overwhelmingly obvious candidate sits at level 16.

When would you be unable to use Frigid Protection, Force of Thunder, or Cauterizing Aura?

Well, I'm saying nothing for or against that idea at the current time, given I don't know the numbers to make that judgment.

The fact that Rage is allowed to stack is problematic. I wouldn't allow it to stack myself. However, that doesn't "fix" the set, it changes it to one where Rage doesn't stack.

How would I change Rage? If I was going to make a change today, I would probably eliminate the current Rage crash except for the -end. Then I would alter the buff so that the first 60 seconds you would get +80% damage and +20% tohit. The second 60 seconds you would get +50% damage and +15% tohit. The damage and tohit buffs would replace instead of stack. That means the faster you recharge it, the more of the high buff you would get (theoretically speaking at 400% recharge you could have it all the time). There would be a reward for higher recharge, but you couldn't double stack the power. And if you activated it while it was still up, the endurance crash would occur immediately.

I would then increase the single target damage of the set by buffing Jab and Punch. I would buff Jab by increasing its damage to 0.84 and its recharge to 3.0 seconds, and change its animation to a more Shadow Punch-like animation (cast time 0.83). I would increase Punch to 1.32 DS and its recharge to 6.0 seconds.

Past that point, it would depend on how much latitude I had in introducing new mechanics to the set to improve its single target design.

The difference is that the CoV devs declared that problem to be working as intended as a weakness of (stalker) stealth. That exemption carried forward to today, where the devs see it as a problem but one that has a low priority to fix (and when they tried and failed to fix it, oh well). But I don't see how the devs are going to argue that /devices was deliberately intended to have its sustain fail in those missions uniquely among all blasters.

I don't see how that is applicable to my argument that capped s/l resistances will not be useless. Are you saying you disagree with my assertion that capped s/l resistance are not useless?

But that's not the same thing as saying its not worth much. The rule is not "everything that doesn't make us immortal is trivial."

Probably not, because I'm /energy manipulation. But would I chase it on my I24 Water/MC blaster, which will have an absorb shield instead of a +regen sustain? Depending on the numbers, maybe. Resistance synergizes with Absorb in a way I don't think even I could convince people of until they see it on beta for themselves.

More likely "Corona"

Characterizing them as useless is a subjective opinion. Characterizing them as non-existent in combat and sticking with that assertion in the face of factual correction is being in love with being wrong.

As to the unwilling stealth thing, as I mentioned above the devs will be almost *forced* to address that because it would otherwise mean /Devices blasters would have to give up Sustain to run escort missions reasonably. I don't know how they would explain that problem if they didn't address it mechanically.

Sorry, misread. Although I'm now curious to know if your ability to take out +4 MI constellations is as much because of the added firepower of AAO as it is the ability to actually tank them.

On the one hand your first thought was all wrong. On the other hand your second thought was half right. Clearly, this means you sometimes think you have one and a half left hands.

Separate from the fact that its already been resolved that defenders get the fast snipe benefit and the range extension benefit, I am still compelled to point out that Defenders have never been datamined to be horrendously underperforming, while Blasters have consistently been so. The only reason someone could perceive Blasters to get more and better attention than Defenders is if they did not realize that the price for that attention was being the worst performing archetype of the entire game, basically for most or all of the game's existence.

That's a price no defender seems willing to pay in order to get similar levels of attention.

Is that a trick question? Forget now, when even my current 40%+ s/l resistance is very noticeable on a blaster. But in I24 blasters are going to have regen-scrapper levels of regeneration inside that resist.

That's a melee set.

If the devs only made one of them it would almost certainly have been scrappers, but with higher caps to allow them to be buffed into tankers on teams.

A lot of people think their roles are clearly defined, but most of them don't agree what they are. Most of them have to be mistaken about how clear the roles are.


It was explicitly stated in CoV beta that the CoV archetype are not CoH archetype analogs: no CoV archetype is intended to be a "replacement" for a CoH archetype. In particular, Brutes were in fact explicitly designed to be scrapper-tanker hybrids in the sense that their design most closely mimicked scrappers, but they received half the aggro control role of tankers (masterminds got the other half).

Inventions and side-switching created a scenario where the dynamic range of the brute archetype significantly overlapped both scrappers and tankers, while scrappers and tankers also edged closer to each other. That created the archetype tension that exists today.