BellaStrega

LoreUndone, your guide has several errors:

You list Smash/Lethal resist as lower than Negative/Toxic in Dark Embrace. Since Smash/Lethal is 22.5% and Negative Toxic is 15%, I'm not sure I understand the math you used to come to this conclusion. Further, you rate Fire/Cold - also at 22.5% - as high, and Energy/Negative - 15% - as moderate, compared to the "low" you rated DE's Negative/Toxic. You also rated Obsidian Shield's Psi resist as moderate, when it's still at 37.5%.

As for Death Shroud, it lets you kill faster and even pre-stamina can save you more endurance than you spend running it. You can use Death Shroud and inspirations to run a mission from beginning to end, with only a couple pauses to recover endurance, at 5th level.

Dark Regeneration should be taken as soon as it becomes available. At 17th level, you can have three end recovery DOs slotted in it, reducing the endurance cost to ~ 33, which is certainly useful. I don't understand your claim that you will take just as much damage as you heal before you're even done using the power, but I guess this falls under the same category as your rating of the various resists.

Cloak of Darkness still provides Stealth, and a tested melee/ranged defense of a bit over 3%. The defense, which is admittedly minor, does not suppress when you attack (unlike Stealth from the power pool), and your running speed is not debuffed while you run it (unlike Stealth from the power pool), so I again find your suggestion that Stealth is superior to be peculiar.

You go on to claim that Dark Melee has the worst to-hit rate in the game, which is simply an incomprehensible statement to make. I mean, it has a base 75% accuracy - the same as most other blast and melee sets. Only the weapon sets and martial arts have higher (5% and 10% respectively). Could you perhaps explain how having the same default accuracy as most other powers equates to "the worst to-hit rate in the game?"

I'm also not understanding how Cloak of Darkness' former 9-10% defense, even slotted to 20-22% with SOs, qualifies as such a decisive part of the powerset in comparison to the set's fairly decent lineup of resists.

I mean, sure, if you have Hasten, Combat Jumping, Cloak of Darkness, and Weave, you're looking at a fairly good defense up to issue 4. But CoD by itself?

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Now some of you might be saying it cant be this bad. Well, please try it yourself and good luck. : P Most people gave up before level 28 before I5 anyhow. Now????? I wouldn’t even suggest anyone actually even attempt DA/DM. Your better off as a Tank actually. : P

I would actually have to classify DA/DM as the worst class within the game currently with no solution in sight other than a major edit.

[/ QUOTE ]and I have to say that I just have to conclude that your guide is some kind of complicated prank. I really hope no one reads it and thinks that you're actually seriously proposing that Dark Armor is weak in comparison to other Scrapper secondaries in issue 5, or that Dark Melee/Dark Armor is a horrible combination with no hope of good performance.

If you're serious, I'd suggest not posting misinformation in the future. It's rude, especially in response to others' guides who are accurate.

So is LoreUndone in reply to your post just making [censored] up or what?

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You mean whenever States puts down his hand-held and stops fighting 64-bit bosses? Whenever States says ANYTHING I just roll my eyes. He is clueless, and a liar to boot. His team just nods and goes with whatever he says, whether they just don't disagree with him or are allowed to. It shows in the absolute lack of quality in the game.

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Generally speaking, the following has been true:

* If Statesman says something in the pipeline, we do get it - or we get a reason why we didn't. The weight of examples is the former, and not the latter.

* If a change makes the game painful to play, it gets rolled back or altered so as to remove the pain. Boss boosts in I3, for example, and the purple patch.

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What happened to that talk about new high level content requiring the nerfing of Hami Os? What happened to the Shard Mole Point system? What happened to encouraging people to level?

While it's nice to see old missions updated with "escort", "capture", "ally", "ambush", and "protect" features, those are few and far between. Mostly, we've just been nerfed and told to roll new characters again.

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I do believe that the higher-level content is still in the pipeline. From Statesman's recent interview on Eurogamer, it looks like some of it is slated for I6.

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I'm just trying to put it into some perspective. Trying to make people see that damage buffs always work of your base damage while -res works on your overall damage, and that a 6% drop in your _overall_ damage is huge!

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I don't think it's that big, really. I also don't think the change was necessary at all. I am more annoyed with the "There's never been any change to EF" line that was given when this was first discussed. The power itself is still quite good.

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I'm not sure why you challenge the percentage change? Say you do 100 points of damage. Old EF let you do 137.5. New EF lets you do 130. 137.5/130~1.05.

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Now lets take an example that might actually occur in reality. Lets assume your base damage is 100 and you have 5 damage SOs, AM running, and you hit Aim. 100*(1+(.33*5)+.25+.66)=356. Remember that -res works on your total damage, not your base damage.

356*1.375=489.5
356*1.3=462.8

Thats a drop of 26.7 points of damage. That is 26.7% of your base damage gone. If you are at the damage cap it's 30% of your base damage gone. Thats like hacking 1 damage SO off of every one of your powers. Don't try to pawn this off as some minor change.

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But it's still a reduction of 5.5% of your total damage. Your base damage is only relevant in determining your total damage after enhancements, and trying to base the claim off your base damage is misleading.

And haven't defenders been using the comparative resistance debuffs in Defender EF vs. Controller EF to show that Controllers use it at 94% effectiveness? This is exactly the same math.

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After using EF for 50 levels on my controller, I'm pretty sure even this modest decrease in power is quite workable inside the Rad set.

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The decrease is fairly minor. For defenders, it's really a 5% reduction in damage output.



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100% - 0.3/0.375 = 20%

I'd say that's a bit more than 5%.

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See above post. Notice I said reduction to damage output, not reduction to the straight debuff.

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The decrease is fairly minor. For defenders, it's really a 5% reduction in damage output.

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I'm not sure where you got 5% from. At the very least, this is a 25% reduction in the power (from 37.5 to 30). And the truth is that -res effects work on your total (with buffs and SOs) damage, not base damage. This nerf amounts to almost taking 1 damage SO out of everyone one of your powers.

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If you hit something affected by enervating field with a 100 point attack,

in issue 4, it would do 137.5 points.
in issue 5, it would do 130 points.

130 is 94.55% of 137.5. This means your damage output is reduced by 5.45%.

That's why I specified damage output, and not the power's straight numbers.

Also, it's a 20% reduction to reduce from 37.5 to 30.

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I agree with you that in principle this nerf was disturbing. But I would go even farther to say that in practice it is even more disturbing. I mean forgetting that they called us liars and all that, I just doesn't make sense in the game. Even after their 3rd spin doctoring of the response, the logic still doesn't add up.

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I agree.

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Defense was lowered so you have to nerf damage output, huh? Anchor based toggle debuffs are too "easy to use", wha? And if you apply this logic to the game uniformly, powers like DN, FR, and TP should have been affected as well, but they weren't. Why does this special brand of resoning apply only to EF?

This change is crap. It is nerfing for the sake of nerfing with no justification. My only guess is that some AT in CoV was getting this power to stack with other -Res effects in some way, and thus it needed to be nerfed. Though I doubt you'd ever get the devs to admit they are nerfing CoH because of CoV.

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I dunno what the real reasoning was, but the defense nerf doesn't make sense. Reduce the damage and accuracy debuffs? That would fit into the overall goal. Mess with the offensive boosts? Not understanding why.

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No Kali, he's amazingly wrong, and what you do has no bearing on what CAN be done.

Drop Tar Patch, gather mobs, apply control, stack Tar Patch, go to town.

Sorry, its faster to kill that way than doing other things.

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No it's not. I primarily play on teams, and damage on teams is already sufficiently high (thanks to blasters and scrappers) that stuff will die faster than I can lay a second tar patch, or if it takes long enough for tar patch to recharge, the second patch is still pointless.

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Stacking Tar patch is relatively a myth outside of AV encounters/Herding...

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[censored]. I have a Dark Defender and it stacks very well.

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He's not saying it doesn't stack. He's saying there's no real point to stacking it outside those situations.

And, honestly, he's right. I only really bother to stack it against AVs and monsters, or drop extras when the fight's moved off the original.

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After using EF for 50 levels on my controller, I'm pretty sure even this modest decrease in power is quite workable inside the Rad set.

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The decrease is fairly minor. For defenders, it's really a 5% reduction in damage output.

The principle of the thing is that a dev said that EF was not reduced, and those saying it was were mistaken or lying. Seeing this patch note now after the comment that was posted when this was first brought up is a bit disturbing.

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Given the massive drawbacks of EF, it should be stronger than TP or FR in effect.

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I never thought I'd see the day when a defender begins to believe that their defender powers should somehow be better than the next defender powers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.

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Oh please, that is NOT what I said. I said it should be stronger "in effect". That means the drawbacks in end usage and application of the power are such that the actual effects (ie the -res debuff) should be more potent. Being weaker is some ways, it should be stronger in other ways. You know, that little thing called balance?

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Well, it has a -damage component, which Freezing Rain and Tar Patch lack. I think that makes it more powerful.

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I can explain that one. 6 slotted for defence fortitude can only be kept on 3 teamates maximum, and that's with hasten. Slot fortitude with 6 recharges, and now it's less than FF, and I don't think it can be kept on 7 people still (at least, not without extreme micromanagement.) FF can be kept on an entire team. It also provides protection against toxic, something fortitude lacks any protection against. Sometimes, the compairison for powers has to be looked at a little deeper than numbers...

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You're right.

Fortitude provides an untyped defense boost greater than FF, and can be kept on three characters at once. The accuracy boost, despite protests to the contrary, is more than worthwhile when fighting higher-level opponents. In addition, you can make endurance a non-issue most of the time, make everyone into regen scrappers, and keep your teammates' health up if it falls.

In contrast, FF can provide def against everything but psi and toxic, resist against toxic, mild defense against psi, and more knockdown than you can shake a stick at. It's much less versatile than empathy. FF can't buff regen rate, recovery rate, or heal if the first line of defense fails.

So, yeah, you're right - you need to examine a set more deeply than just the numbers. However, I think you're underselling empathy yet again.

You should copy the not-ice-tanker specific parts of that post to the defender thread. Statesman made a post there about defense vs. resistance, and why defense is superior and thus needs to be weaker.

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Once again, I think Jack needs to buy a new dictionary, the one where the word 'balance' doesn't have all those typos. Much less 'global'. I like how we're being expected to swallow these changes when they don't even apply to every power set.

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Well... I tend to agree. Balance is as much about consistency in design as it is anything else. Its very clear that the powersets now lack consistency, let alone balance.

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There have been inconsistencies in the powersets since launch, and some have taken a long time to redress. Others never have been, and even others have been exacerbated in issue 5. I'm not saying they should exist, I'm saying this isn't new. What bothers me is that the devs are willing to keep things imbalanced.

And to be honest, I really hope that the Kheldian phase shifts don't get changed to match Phase Shift and Hibernate, 'cause it'll hurt them a lot. Nerf them, and they'll die a lot more on large teams.

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Well, after some quick testing, I found out that I have no staying power at all. Isn't that what the tank is there for?

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Say hello to your Issue 5 Ice Tank!

- JJ

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Well, I can't say that it isn't a challenge at least, if that's what this issue was meant to bring

All I want is to be able to tank a even level boss for a while, when I can't do that I feel pretty bad :P

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I was able to tank an even-level dark vampyr boss long enough to defeat it, provided I had at least one minion nearby for EA to get endurance. Yes, that was effectively two boss fights in a row, but it was do-able.

Now, throw in a full spawn for a team with that boss, and all bets are kinda off.

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Just because you're in SG mode doesn't mean you automatically get Prestige. You still have to do things.

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One of CoH's strengths is character customizability, and one of the cool things about SG colors is the ability to put them on when you want to. My concern about this system is that you end up discouraging the former by rewarding players for going in SG mode all the time, and you discourage the latter because people who want to keep their unique looks will do no more than sport the SG insignia in their default colors.

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Hyperbole? I don't think so. It doesn't matter if you can grab all the aggro if you fold like a house of cards whenever the bad guys actually attack you. My scrapper heals fast and gets more melee defense than my icer with PARRY.

That's so BALANCED I think Jack needs a new dictionary.

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It's not hyperbole. My dark/dark scrapper can survive spawns that will murder my ice/stone tanker. Regen can survive those spawns too, as can Invuln. SR running Elude has a good chance, but I can't hit enough defense to floor what I'm fighting before they tear me down to red. With two spawns on unyielding, this happens so fast, I barely have time to: EA -> Hibernate.

As I said before, though, I can survive pretty well if I use lucks before such a fight.

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I am sorry to say - I used your i5 respec on my 28 ice tank today - no sense wasting a valuable character slot..

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You should be.

My respec is tongue-in-cheek, although bitterly so. Also, it's something I wouldn't do unless ice tankers go live in their current state and the devs let them sit that way for a month or so without going, "you know, maybe those forum posters had a clue when they said it SUCKED."

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Oh yeah, silly me, I forgot myself for a second there and thought we had at least a minor leg up on some of the other tanker sets.

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Ice's niche is "anything I can do, someone else can do better."

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Oh I dunno, we faceplant pretty good...better than average I'd say! I dunno about you, but sometimes keeping an eye on that wily floor for signs of danger helps out the team...right?...RIGHT?!?

I GOT IT!

Whenever we faceplant, our toggle armours melt across the floor creating a controller sized Ice Slick. At least that way, our constant falling down will do something for the team.

"The only tanker that'll tank better AFTER we faceplant!"

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Well, no argument that ice tankers are good at it, but blasters can faceplant better than we do, and Fire tankers can tank better than us after they faceplant.

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Oh yeah, silly me, I forgot myself for a second there and thought we had at least a minor leg up on some of the other tanker sets.

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Ice's niche is "anything I can do, someone else can do better."

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Dave Williams likes Issue 5. That was the extent of our Issue 5 discussion. Another audience member started to talk about I5 a little, but I asked a question on a different topic right after that to avoid degeneration into the same stuff we all read here on the forums. I'll leave Issue 5 discussions from GenCon to other posters that may have talked about it with the NCSoft guys. I avoided the phrase "Issue 5" like the plague, myself.

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I find this disappointing, as some fruitful discussion may have resulted with the ability to get immediate feedback. I mean, I can understand not personally wanting to discuss issue 5, but doing your best to make sure no one else gets to either?

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Yeah, I bet the other five people were really upset.

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Oh, I doubt it. I'm only mildly annoyed, but only because I was hoping a couple of questions would get asked and answered.

It sounds like a bigger deal than it really is because this is a forum, and people naturally polarize or assume polarization on a forum.

It seemed like a good cap to Circ's rant.

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So what's an Ice Tank's niche again? Oh yeah, that's right its not defense, its not damage mitigation, its to sit in a freakin' ice cube and whistle dixie for hours on end. That's why Hibernate is my Happy Place, its all I've got.

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Blasters can get hibernate in an epic, though.

Just to be clear, I appreciate the rest of the information.