Barata

I thought Regen was pretty easy to get. For the heck of it, I decided I wanted my fire/ice blaster to max out his regen.

5-slotted Health, two of the slots with the two uniques that offer regen.
Hover has Freebird Stealth and Fly in it, for more regen.
Positron's Blast, I believe, has regen.
Entropic Chaos has regen.

I think my regen is up to 1.3% or 1.4% per second. Regen bonuses are usually the first one in the set, making them easier to get. I also have the accolades that grant higher hitpoints, so that makes it even more effective. In any case, I enjoy it on my blaster.

It just seems sooooo right thematically! I couldn't care less about the mitigation aspect. It helps a little, but when you're high enough that you're starting to slot purples, you generally don't benefit much from having a couple mobs get knocked down. It's just all kinds of awesome to see fireball explode and all those mobs get tossed around. Also, it's not like you sacrifice much. Even though it uses a slot, you still have plenty of damage and accuracy and recharge and endurance reduction.

If anyone else has Fireball on their fire blaster, we heartily recommend this!

I also put the purple ranged Chance for Energy Damage proc in Chillblain (my blaster is fire/ice). That definitely has increased the overall damage of Chillblain. Chillblain is one of the best blaster Tier 1 secondary powers, and it does somewhere between minor and moderate damage. With that one proc for energy damage, the overall damage output has increased noticeably. I use that power a lot and it's part of my attack string. The only time I don't use it is if someone lays an ice patch down or some other knockdown effect. The energy proc has definitley upped my damage output.

I was in a debate with someone who claimed that learning this game is very easy and takes no time at all. I claimed that as vets, it's easy to say that, but when you think back to all the different things you had to learn when you first started, it's a different story. Yeah, the game's not hard, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot of stuff to learn. And my example is that the enhancement system is not intuitive and is something you don't learn in a minute. For a brief while on my first character, I thought that when you combine two enhancements, you get one that's twice as strong. So I kept combining them to make them twice and three times as strong, and have something like a single 15++ damage enhancement in my power instead of three level 15 enhancements.

Ha! I did the same thing. I think a lot of people do that. I thought "well, my blaster's personality is Tenacious, but my scrapper definitely thinks he's Invincible!" LOL!

But humans are tough and chewy. Er..... at least, I'd imagine them to be that way.

Or....

Cows eat vegetables.
Cows are made of vegetables.
Eating a cow is eating vegetables.


Besides, if God wanted us to be vegetarians, then why did He make animals out of meat?

You too? I put that in my Fireball and love it. The fireball itself is like a minor explosion. Seeing some of the mobs get tossed up from it just seems right.

Uh.... are you sure you were directing that to the right person? I rarely use AE, don't farm it when I do, and I've been playing for over five years. I'm definitely not an "AE Noob". Whoever you are, there's no reason to be rude just because you can do it anonymously (that's a poor character trait), but if you positively must, then at least direct it to the right person.

Fair enough. Like I said in my post, it was only to illustrate the validity of feelings on both sides. Nothing more. I wasn't addressing actions on either side of the debate.

Personally, I like AE but feel it gives out too many rewards. When such a large number of people flock to one single mechanism because the experience and drops (cashed in with the tickets) are perceived to be so much better than the rest of the game, then it's out of balance. I'd also remove it from the lower zones because from a purely game-design point of view, I'd want my new users to first see the "real" game world before engaging in player-created content. Existing users would already be aware of the building in the higher zones , and new players would have the best chance of experiencing the game as you designed. Many RPG games start our linearly and then open up. They do that so you can familiarize the player with the game and the environment before hitting him with too much.

1) Caltrops can be very useful. When tossed in front of you, it helps keep mobs away from you. As they hit the caltrops, they'll turn around and try to get off rather than continuing to you to do melee damage. The range is VERY short, and some mobs aren't slowed by them (wolves, for instance). But most mobs will try to get off.

2) I've found little use for Teleport Foe. Unless you're a vet and don't need to take a first choice before getting your teleport power, I'd probably stick with Recall Friend given the choice. If you just have it as an addition to a different travel power, then it's up to you to decide if you use it frequently enough to sacrifice another power for it.

3) Interesting. I've recently started swapping out my frankenslotted IOs to put in full sets of Thunderstrike. Smoke Grenade gives an almost 5% debuff to enemy accuracy. Slotted, it can hit 7.5%. Debuffing an enemy's accuracy directly stacks on to any defense you have. Thunderstrike, six-slotted, gives something like 3.75% ranged and AoE defense. A couple of those brings it to 7.5%. Combined with slotted Smoke Grenade, you're the equivalent of 15%. Now you're at a point where it starts making a difference. Add in small amounts of defense from combat jumping or hover, and maybe the Resistance/Defense IO from that one resistance set (I can't remember which)j if you get the Body Armor from the Epic pool, and you can hit 20% defense quite easily. And that's without even trying too hard. I can't say yet if it'll be worth it, but it sounds good. I've only just started striving for defense on my AR/Dev blaster, so I'll have to see how far I can take him.

4) I'd go for range or recharge before the proc. The proc is only minor damage. I don't think it'll increase your overall damage output as much as recharge would. If you decide to stick with range, it'll help those two AoEs get closer to the range of your single-target attacks, which mean you don't have to get nearly as close. Range IS a good defense for blasters, as long as you can maintain it, and that certainly helps.

5) I didn't take Sniper Rifle. I had it but respecced out of it. I'd like to get it back again. Sting of the Manticore is a good set for sniper attacks. An additional 12% regeneration, 3% damage, and 7.5% recharge. All three are nice. And yes, regeneration is a good thing to have. I strived for high regeneration on my fire/ice blaster, and it serves him quite well. Even modest regeneration lets you ignore those smaller amounts of damage that normally start adding up over time and keep moving at a brisk pace.

Actually, I'll go back a bit further and say that the groundwork was laid down with IOs in general.

In the first couple of years the game was out, there was no real "loot" other than Hami-Os. People farmed Hamidon. There was no reason to farm anything else. Other than Hamidon, the only thing you could focus your attention on in the game was the provided content. If you played a task force, it was because you felt like taking on a longer sequence of missions for nothing more than being able to say "I did it!".

Of interest is that one of the things that was extolled in the forums by players was the lack of "loot" in the game and that nobody felt they needed a certain rare item or weapon or charm or any of those other things people obsessed about in the other games. "You can just play the game and not have to worry about collecting your loot!"

Jump to IOs. What a marvelous addition. Finally there was a way of customizing your character in ways never possible before. You can now have blasters with some basic defense (I chose regeneration, but that's besides the point). You can get knockback protection, stealth, and any number of cool traits for your toons. But since they were only obtainable as random drops or through the consignment house, there was now something new to focus on besides the content.... maximizing their drop rate. It was at that point in the game that farming took off and playstyles changed (speed running task forces and trials so you'd get the reward faster). Merits only made the distribution of the reward more fair, it was the addition of the rewards themselves (IOs) that made the major shift.

Of course. But you still have to be exposed to something before you can learn it.

My whole trip to level 50 was a learning experience. But I found that I was still learning some new things a couple months after I started playing. Keep in mind that five years ago, leveling was a much slower experience than it is now, even if you don't use AE.

Please don't suggest a person has "learned the game" after a day or two of playing. If by "learning the game" you mean "when you click on an attack, you attack your target", then yeah, that's a simple concept and takes a second to learn. But anyone who thinks back to their first experiences in the game will realize that there's quite a bit of things to learn, and it took them some time to do it. Things that we take for granted, a new player can't.

Learning to play isn't hard. The original reference though was regarding new players. It's not hard for them to learn to play, but there are definitely quite a few things that are needed to be learned. As for the boss farms.... you can't say that. There's many different types of boss farms. Some are difficult, some are much easier. Also, team makeup is very important. If you got on a group with several vets, it could be relatively easy. If that group only had one veteran on it, and several relatively new players, you'd see quite a few deaths.

Personally, I dislike boss farms. There's no variety. Each enemy takes the exact same amount of work to defeat, and each of them takes time. Typical spawns, with a mixture of enemy types, is more fun for me because I like that the enemies get defeated at different rates. It's fun when a minion runs up to me thinking he's gonna be putting in some hurt and I just drop him like a sack of potatoes. You don't get that on boss farms. That's why I find them tedious.

Well said.

I've ragged on the fact that new players have level 50's (or multiple level 50's) that they didn't know how to play, but I never called them stupid. If anything, I feel sorry for those players. They've just started playing and run the serious risk of jumping straight into the "jaded" category without actually having experienced 95% of the game. People have said "what they do with their money is their business, it's their decision", but I think that's a harsh, irresponsible attitude. These new players don't have the knowledge to make an educated decision regarding powerleveling. They may think they do, but they don't even know what they don't know (yes, that sentence makes sense). I'm not going to say it's anyone's responsibility to let them know they shouldn't be AEing as new players, but I'll say that doing so is being courteous. You don't have to help pick someone up if they slip and fall down, but you're nice if you do.

Well, it's easy to say that when you're a veteran and already know how to play your toons. But to someone who's never played before..... there is definitely a learning curve.

For one thing, the basic enhancement system is incredibly unintuitive. TOs, DOs, SOs.... all of them offering different levels of enhancement, and then the level of enhancement changes depending upon your own level? The IO system makes sense, but the regular enhancements only make sense after you learn it. And remember this.... an accuracy SO enhances your power more than a defense SO, and then ED places a cap on that. Not exactly intuitive.

The difference between passive and active defenses, and the various types of defenses and resistances, can get complicated. We have positional and typed defenses, and defensive toons get a scaling resistance too. We know what a mob's to-hit chance is and therefore know how much damage to expect with a given amount of defense. A new player doesn't.

And then there's the interaction of the archetypes when playing on teams, especially heroside. Does an Energy/EM blaster new to the game know that if he does a knockback cone to the mobs surrounding a tank, that they're no longer in the tank's aggro aura? It's not complicated, and it can be quickly learned, but there's MANY things like that that have to be learned. Like you said, it's not a complicated game.... once you learn it. It's until you learn it that there's dozens of little things that we take for granted that are totally unknown to a new player.

Then she's not a very good villain. Er..... bad villain? I'm so confused.

They can be very challenging. Likewise, they can be very easy when the mobs are designed with an attack type that the author happens to have the highest defense against, and designed with the least resistance to the attack type the author happens to have.

Your Mileage May Vary. Something may work either better or worse for you, depending upon how you use it or slot it and the tactics used.

Blasters have a level 32 ultimate attack we refer to as nukes. It's the most damaging power in the set. Some nukes are PBAoE. You just run into the center of a group of enemies and fire it off. Some are targetted AoE and you click where you want the effect to be. Most nukes do extreme damage, recharge slowly, totally drain you of endurance, and make it so you don't recover endurance for a short period afterwards. Assault Rifle and Archery blasters have nukes that are a little different. They don't do as much damage as other nukes, but they recharge much faster and don't drain your endurance, making them usable much more frequently.

The discussion was about some of the negative impacts the AE can have. That is one of them. If you don't like that I brought it up, then .... so what? My opinion is no less valid than yours.

You admit that you simply don't team with other people that aren't, presumably, your friends or SG. That's fine for you. But likewise, you can't then claim to know the impact on other players since you're not actually interacting with them. I like multiplayer games because I like meeting other people. And even if some of these newcomers have picked up bad skills, I'm not going to hold them in contempt personally (like you do). As long as someone is friendly and shows a basic level of respect for other people, they're going to be fine by me.

That doesn't mean that the ability for AE to teach bad skills to newcomers is any more acceptable.