Aett_Thorn

Melt Armor for Tankers and Brutes is a pretty low value debuff, on a long recharge. It's useful at times, but there are other powers that offer better value.

-DMG is effective, it's just not quite as effective as straight-up Resistance. But it can work. Like NoiseBlind said, it does scale with enemy level to you, so the higher the enemy, the less -DMG you will inflict.

But if you can stack it, it works as straight damage reduction, and will stack from different powers. An Ice/Kin/Soul Tanker can make excellent use of the -DMG mechanic to become very survivable.

I'd say that Lost was pretty mainstream as well. Maybe a bit cultish now that it had the horrible ending that drove away a lot of fans, but it's not like it wasn't a very well-watched show.

Also, OP, a few suggestions:

1) You don't need Acrobatics. You are protected against KB and Holds by Active Defense.

2) You're taking all of the Leadership toggles, which will be very expensive to run, and most won't give you that much benefit. In exchange for this, you are delaying some very good powers, such as Shield Charge, Against All Odds, and Phalanx Fighting.

3) Instead of the Leadership power pool, the Fighting Pool would give you access to Tough and Weave, which will help you more. Put them in once you get the powers I've mentioned above, though.

I would imagine that if Traps was ported to Controllers, you'd see a few changes to the set. Most of the debuff powers would be fine, I think (though you'd have all of the various pseuo-pet issues with some of them). But on an AT that can completely shut down a spawn, the two bomb powers might be a bit OP.

First off, welcome back!

Since you only left in 2010, you were here for a good deal of the stuff that's out. However, you have missed the game going free-to-play, obviously, along with the changes to the Paragon Market and account types that that brings.

You were here for Inventions, I take it, so I don't need to cover that, but you're probably missed out on the whole Incarnate thing. However, I am not sure if you are VIP or not, and since the Incarnate content is VIP-only, I'm not sure if I'd be wasting your time with that or not.


While I am sure that you will get a lot of good answers here, I am compelled to give you a link: www.paragonwiki.com

That is a GREAT source of information, and you can see exactly what you missed out on there.

It really depends on where you're coming from. You can soft-cap an SR character much easier than most other sets. For instance, on a Tanker, you do not have to get a single +Def set bonus to be over the soft-cap for all positions if you take Weave. That leaves you with set bonuses to chase other things if you want. This also allows players who don't have access to IOs to hit the soft-cap, which is a good thing.


Other sets may have more tools to help balance things out, but SR does have the scaling resistances which can help out a bit, a passive +Recharge power, and is fairly slot-light. Yes, you need to take most of the powers (which is another problem, I will grant you), but doing so leaves you very well off for most of the game.

With the changes to set bonuses coming out, an SR character can build up some resistance, too, so that should help. Stacking them with Tough should make an SR character very sturdy.

Defenders get a 30% damage enhancement solo, so you should be alright. I'm just not sure how good Nature/ is solo, though, but it should be fine for damage (at least as much as Sonic is).

I'm planning on rolling a Demon/Nature MM. Grow, little demon plants, grow!

Also remember that you can always stick the Proc in a different power than the rest of the enhancements. Though the Recharge is nice, if you want to slot the Proc in something like Fire Blast, and the rest of the set in Fireball, you can do that.

Who needs running water when you have City of Heroes?!

I love that you are still using that avatar, Traegus.

A slower-recharging ST attack I think is better, since it's based off of PPM (Procs per minute). If you have the Superior version slotted, an attack with a base recharge of 12 seconds or more should have this go off every time.

Eeeeexcellent. My fiancee goes away for a few days next week, so I'll have plenty of time to play.

Shield is a pretty good primary for a Tanker. It has good Aggro control abilities, helps with damage output, and is fairly sturdy (especially with IOs). The resistances it gets aren't bad, especially since they tend to be "bonus" effects of powers that you're going to take anyways. The IO set bonus changes should make it even better, because as you're going for the soft-cap for defenses, you'll likely pick up some extra resistance along the way.

As for pairings, you've picked three pretty good sets. /War Mace contains stuns and KD effects which can help you with mitigation. I have one of these, and he's very tough to take down. My only problems with him have been that he sucks down Endurance like a fiend. More IO slotting with him will likely help that out.

/Electric is a fun pairing. You'll have plenty of AoE, and two teleport attacks, which can be very fun and useful. Endurance use again might be a bit of a concern, but it will be a lot of fun in the higher levels.

/Dark is probably the best secondary to shore up Shield/'s weaknesses, though. It gets a self-heal power (which Shield lacks), and an Endurance recovery power, which will help you run your toggles with less worry. It also offers some substantial +DMG to pair with what you get from Against All Odds, and the -ToHit stacks well with the Defense from the shields. However, the -ToHit you'll notice less as you level and get closer to the soft-cap for Defense, but it can still be useful.


It's actually tough to find a BAD secondary for Shields, because all of them benefit in some form or another.

The models that we have in-game with multiple legs are usually just cylinders with different visuals. They don't use an actual skeleton like player models would have. It would basically mean making a whole new skeleton for those to work, much like the making the skeleton for animals that we got. However, Tank treads I could possibly see working, but I have no idea how much work that would take or if it is feasible at all. After all, how would you perform martial arts kicks with tank treads?

I don't really think the images are the problem, but the balance concerns are. I still think it would work, but it would be tough.


As an aside, I like your comments about the mech games. My favorite models were the speedy, but lightly-armed mechs. I could run around the other guys, taking random shots at the legs, and I would move too fast for them to hit me. But I'd have to say my absolute favorite for taking out enemy AI was to load the heaviest mech I had available to me with as many machine guns and the largest engine I could get. Machine guns were horrible weapons in those games usually, but if you had 20 of them, and could get into close range, they'd demolish enemy mechs in seconds. Fantastic fun.

I have come to believe that a blast/armor AT could work in this game, because we have them now, and they're not game breaking. As such, a power armor AT would really work, the numbers just need to be balanced, which does take some time. I mean, we have no Tech EAT (or Mutant or Magic, for that matter), so why not work on one?


However, if this can't be made into a whole AT for fear of imbalances, I've been thinking for a while now that you could do something fairly well with this with just a powerset. Now, some might say that it would be too origin-limiting to have just a "powersuit" blast set. Fair point. But the great thing is, we now have alternate animations that can help us with this. While this would take twice as long as some other power sets, I think that it could be done.

What you do is this: you create a powerset that has two separate animations for its powers. One animation set is the typical "powersuit" options, such as gattling guns and missile launchers from the shoulders and such. The second animation set is more of an "arcane" blast set. The effects from each would be the same, it would just affect the animations and launch points of the blasts.

So you'd have something like this:

Tier 1: Minor blast
Animation 1: wrist-mounted laser beam from the right hand
Animation 2: "laser" beam fired from the palm

Tier 2: Second ST blast
Animation 1: tech missile barrage from wrist of left hand
Animation 2: "magic missile"-styled blast from both hands

Tier 3: Cone Missile Barrage
Animation 1: Missiles fired from shoulder tech pod
Animation 2: energy blasts fired from the hands


etc.

Kinetic Melee can also be a good choice, if you don't want to deal with redraw. With Mu Mastery, you can get two ranged single-target attacks, two ranged cones, and two ranged AoEs. Not bad for a Tanker or Brute.