Arc_Salvo

You know how Fury builds up when the Brute gets attacked or attacked? And how domination builds up based only on how often the Dominator attacks?

What if defiance built up based on how often the Blaster was attacked only? That'd sure be better than we have now. They could nerf the max damage on defiance, but make it more useable.

There's bugs like this with defiance. Sometimes it give you no buff at all when you're damaged, and gives you a buff when you're at full health.

It's still not coded to be 100% right.

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Foreshadow looks like an MA/SR

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He isn't!!! Martial Arts in COH/COV don't punch! They fling their legs around like they're psychotic can-can dancers and don't use their hands at all unless they're going to deliver the odd cobra strike!

Foreshadow's style look more energy-melee-ish to me, personally.

Although I personally would love to see a set with chi-powered punches AND kicks, as well as chi blasts.

Or Kyo Kusanagi/Iori Yagami's "Magatama" firey martial arts styles from King of Fighters. They're way too cool.

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The Korean language doesn't have a plural form, from what I understand. Thus City of Hero.

And the "shapeshifting" just seemed like a stylized version of teleport to me.

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Plurals are a separate word, that indicate a group when added after a word that identifies a type of person.

So a direct translation from English to Korean would read like: "City of Hero Persons" as there's no way to indicate plurality in one word.

Anyhow... Awry's a she? News to me.

Learn something new every day.

I also think that there was a little too much gratuitous-feeling "shock" scenes, and that the ending was too quick.

Honestly felt like there should've been another Issue to finish this arc with the right pacing.

Oh my... now Rain of Arrows will be worth taking... and aim+buildup+ Blizzard will be insane if you have aoe immobs on your team.

And the stuff you could pull with aim+buildup+Rain of Arrows every time ROA is up will make Archery much more popular, I'm guessing.

It'll be able to out-do even Full Auto one on one for instance, which'll be nice for the people who took ROA before and wept when they discovered it was unbuffable aside from enhancements.

I'm -very- happy at this fact.

This is an excellent guide! I've done alright up until now with my Robotics/FF, but this guide has given me a very clear plan of what to do in the future.

Sure thing! Glad I could contribute. I seriously had a really bad build prior to reading your guide. Flurry, Crippling Axe Kick(when it did thunder kick damage), 4-slotted brawl and 1 acc 2 dmg 1 endredux 1 status effect (if the power had any) slotting (back when 1 acc 5 damage was possible) levels of bad.

Needless to say, your guide helped a LOT.

Hey again, Tulzar, good to see your familiar but different guide again! It was your guide (and Tpull's) that turned my MA/SR from a total wuss to a wrecking machine back in the I4 days.

I just want to personally thank you for all the good info you gave, as it's done me good on my main all the way up until now.

Anyhow, I just have one caveat to add to your guide:

For non /Regen types, adding 1 endurance reducer to every attack (except maybe light ones like Thunder Kick/pool attacks) is very useful, especially if you're running a lot of toggles.

For my /SR I find Stamina to be very useful (almost necessary in fact), and would think it'd be close to the same for /INV and particularly /DA.

And for people who think that Air Superiority is too clumsy looking for a "Martial Arts" attack, Boxing is a good replacement for Thunder Kick, imho. Great when used with Brawl to give yourself the appearance of actually having upper-body involvement in the fight.

edit: An interesting thing to note is that Crippling Axe Kick does about 83% of the damage of Crane Kick now. If you don't like the knockback in Crane, or dislike the Slow animation time of Eagle's Claw, CAK is a good replacement for either (although I personally prefer Crane and Eagle to it as Crane knockbacks up to bosses and Eagle's Claw has a 60% chance to disoreint up to LT's as well as that 10% extra chance to crit) due to it's new high-damage.

The people that especially hate the knockback of Crane should more than anyone else now consider CAK instead of it now, as it's good damage.

Anyhow, I tested a build without a light, quick attack (Boxing/Air Superiority/Thunder Kick) but with Storm/Crane/CAK/Dragon/Eagle's in the Training Room, and having 3 slow-ish animation heavy hitters seems highly redundant (especially vs minions) and I was aching for a quick attack to finish off those slivers of health left on most of the enemies I was fighting after I hit 'em with a heavy attack, and with hasten on, I had waay too much overlap between the 3 heavy hitters, given that I also had quickness from /SR.

I believe Castle knows already. As far as I know, the problem has been noted and code is on the way.

Expect the patch to fix this problem... "soon".

*ducks*

Aren't the biggest rolls colloquially called "Supa Trolls?" Just wondering. At any rate, this article has inspired me to Go Hunt. Kill Trols.

I loved the Atta mission, if only because I took it with a team of 2 blasters, a fire/fire tank, and a dark/dark defender. We had so many stacked aoe's that the whole group died within seconds!

Mad xp, very reasonable risk.

That said, I didn't know that Grendel was smart. Where is this info in the game?

Sleepy Kitty, your theory is the same as my theory.

edit: 'cept for the Italian suit thing. I always pictured more of a Viking look.

Well whoever it is, I'd love to meet 'im in game. Grendel sounds likely.

And I'm also loving the police files on the Elite Bosses. Pure storyline gold!

Longbow > Villains. Pretty much it. Or I guess we can just use the "Longbow rawks, Villains suk" line of logic.

Or the devs want us to get so sick of being thumped by Longbow, that we go back to COH high-level gameplay just to get away with 'em.

But seriously... it's probably a design oversight.

Yeah, for some odd reason I kinda expected Cuppa to be a Fire/Fire tank.

Maybe it's because you can use fire to make coffee.

Well, I've played my MA/SR a lot lately, and since I6/ED I have noticed that Tanks have been taken down a pretty noticable notch. Whereas on teams before I never had to directly support the tank to keep him/her alive, nowadays I find myself using Dragon's Tail to knockdown the mob around the Tanker and then focusing on a particularly troublesome enemy (usually a Boss) to take some heat off the Tanker. In many groups, I actually MUST do this in order to keep the Tanker from dying if I'm the only other melee type.

That was a shock to me, having gotten used to many team-oriented Tanks in I4 and I5 with 5-6 slotted defenses and poor Offense that were the bread to my 6-slotted attacks, poor defense Scrapper butter that I had Pre-ED.

Heck, surprisingly, I can actually out-tank some tanks when I have two lucks and/or Elude up! Now that ED's forced me to take and slot all my defenses (nothing else to do with those extra slots now that my Offense/damage is capped so low, and now that Stamina/Hasten/etc. don't need to be more than 3-slotted...) I've noticed that the maximum mitigation a Scrapper can get actually now rivals the maximum mitigation a Tanker can get, especially if you have a defender/controller to buff you! I tanked Jurassik with my MA/SR this way when I couldn't grab a Tanker for our Jurassik group.

That said, in many situations on the invincible missions that I team for (I pretty much only run Invincible, as it's the only setting that gets me xp worth a damn in the upper 30's and lower 40's) only a real Tank can tank for the teams that I'm on. Red and Purple mobs are nothing to laugh at, and a huge spawn full of super + cons just plain obliterate me even through Elude a lot of times. Plus, even for those groups I can tank with Elude or lucks, I find that I can't hold onto aggro well/long enough and that the squishies (particularly Blasters, who can grab aggro off a Scrapper lickety-split) get decimated fairly easily when I try to tank.

But that's for invincible level missions with quite a few people. At lower difficulty levels and for smaller groups, I notice that it's quite possible to go without a tanker and in fact, to have no one really doing all that much "tanking" if there's enough control/buffing/debuffing floating around.

Especially at the lower levels, nowadays... been doing a lot of groups in Atlas/King's/The Hollows/Steel/etc. without a Tanker, and everyone's fine and dandy.

All that said... Granite Armor + teleport = absolutely ungodly tanking! But Granite using Stone Tankers aren't representative of all Tankers, of course.

Yep, he's hovering. The website designers were too lazy to add any other details, I guess, like someone else said.

With Elude, /SR is practically invincible in PVP (with all passives and toggles 3-slotted with defense) unless you run into a defense debuffer, or a person with confuse/fear.

Whoah, great job Castle!

And I thought he'd peaked when I found out that he got the team to agree to fix Claws!

The guy just keeps on impressing. Probably the most responsive, insightful, and honest dev I've seen.

I like Castle! He's down to earth, honest, and has tons of common sense.

Played extensively with Elude last night.

I know this has been said before, but I honestly think that I5's nerfs (with ED in consideration) were at least partially based on the maximum amount of defense a /SR Scrapper could achieve with all toggles, passives AND Elude.

So far, only fighting 5 +4 Rikti Bosses (didn't pick the fight intentionally, found myself in it in the Sewer Trial) allowed damage to come in so fast and frequently that I couldn't pop an insp or two to rescue myself.

And to think of what you could do with Elude in PVP... sheesh!

But now that I have Elude, it makes me wonder again about the kind of "bipolar" nature of /SR. This isn't the case all the time, but there's a lot of times where you're either you're getting hit all/almost all the time for almost full damage (depending on whether you have the passives or not), or you're totally invincible unless you get unlucky. Until I got all the toggles AND passives, I never felt as if I had a solid, reliable defense vs all enemy classes and types. One lucky streak from a large enough group of LT's or 2-3 bosses and I was meat. And now that I have Elude, I've noticed that it's the opposite case while it's on. Nothing can hit me.

Until I had enough toggles/passives (all of 'em, pretty much) I was kind of underpowered. Now that I do have all of 'em AND Elude... I'm kind of overpowered. I'm just saying that with defense designed the way it is... it's very tricky to find a healthy in-between.

Also: this might be kind of a stretch, but I think that the resistance in the passives is sort of meant to represent this "grazing hit" principle.

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I have ran missions with my lvl 50 spine/invuln with my roomates lvl 50 spine/SR and his SR beats me hands down in any mission. We were fighting +1's and +2's. He rarely took a scratch while i got killed in a matter of seconds.

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I play a level 37 MA/SR. And I think the reason why he was outperforming you was because you were fighting +1's and +2's. I fought hordes of mobs near even-connish today in Eden with a /Regen scrapper, and while the huge numbers were able to hit him reliably and therefore blow through his regen, they were barely able to touch me as well. I was amazed at how much damage white and blue minions (and white/yellow Lt's and yellow/orange bosses) could do to /Regen compared to how little they did to me. My /regen friend took every hit for full damage (he had no resistances) and got either nearly killed or flat out killed. I, on the other hand took damage steadily, and if I used a luck or two (I loaded up my tray 2/3rd full of lucks) I was able to take on bosses pretty darn safely too!

So I totally believe that /inv (which doesn't have as much defense as /SR, even with invincibility/tough hide) could be worse than /SR in situations where enough defense can lead to near-invincibility (enemies swing a lot, but miss all or most of the time), whereas resists (without as high defense) would just lead to getting hit by lots and lots of damage that you don't quite resist enough not to die.

Tested the I6 buff to /SR on live. It's kinda nice. I respecced out of tough, and I barely notice the difference in damage mitigation. 5% resists is better than nothing, and the scaling increase does seem to help when the damage comes in slowly and steadily, in surviveable amounts. So if you're soloing -2 to +2 cons or heroic-tenacious and maybe even some rugged missions, you will notice the difference. At one point, the extra resist gave me just enough oomph to take down a +2 purple boss without getting killed.

Unfortunately, the main problem of /SR (the fact that it doesn't scale as well/linearly as resists and self heal) still remains.

While I was able to solo much more easily on the lower difficulty setting, on the higher ones (Unyielding and Particularly Invincible), I found my defense being defeated with astounding ease, and was hit by LT's and Bosses for incredible amounts of damage. A few times I was 2-3 shotted so fast, that the scaling resists didn't have time to kick in.

And that's when I realized that /SR's defense was still inferior to resists/self heal, or a mix of resist/heal when fighting higher con/class enemies. Yes, even after the buff. I found myself wishing for a self-heal like dull pain when I got particularly unlucky and a LOT of hits from a group of minions got through my 3-slotted toggles AND passives and afterwards nearly died.

And I -seriously- wished that I had more reliable damage mitigation not based on chance when red and purple LT's and bosses (which I know you aren't supposed to be soloing... but still!) completely blew through my defenses and hit me EVERY single time.

If you're hit every single time with /regen and /inv, you still get reliable damage mitigation. With /sr, you get scaling resists that don't mean squat because the hits are so powerful compared to the measely resists that you get 2-3 shotted anyhoo.

So devs, while I LOVE the changes you've made in the game to make /sr more viable (resist inspirations are great, as are the new scaling resists in the passives, even if the scaling part doesn't make sense to me from a "roleplaying" perspective [although the resists can be explained by the "rolling with the punch" concept that several of us would be /sr reformers espoused])

I think /SR needs more work to be as good as /inv /regen and even /da now are.

Sure /SR is the best when you're fighting -cons (you can be surrounded by literally hordes of greens/blues and be totally untouched)... but who fights that way?

Well, I don't know about all of the evil options. Some of them seem a bit too extreme for any hero, although I do understand how they'd be appropriate for Anti-Heroes like the Punisher, Ghost Rider, converted Villains that turn into heroes, etc.

I definitely do want to see the alignment-neutral costume pieces brought over though.

And perhaps it would be best if many or most of the Villain-exclusive options stayed in COV so Villain players in COV don't cry foul over all of their new and "exlusive" stuff being ported over to the other side?