Ben_Arizona

It's not guaranteed that Scrapper Soul Mastery will have it, given that Scrapper Darkness Mastery doesn't.

This relates to something I've seen with a few characters, not just with slows. The observation I've made, such as it is, is that the enemy AI is very good at determining a path to your character, even a non-obvious one, but not very good at determining whether taking that path is a good idea.

As far as I can tell, a typical enemy with a mix of attacks (such as your average Hellion with a baseball bat and a pistol, or a Mek Man with energy blasts and energy-melee attacks, or etc.) will have three attack "modes", which I call ranged, approach, and melee.

If an enemy sees that it has no path to you, it will go into ranged mode. It will use only ranged attacks and may or may not run around a bit in between them. Ranged mode is also used by enemies immobilized out of melee range. This is sensible programming, because, well, ranged attacks are all that'll work.

If an enemy sees that it has a path to you, but it is out of melee range, it will go into approach mode and try to get into melee range. In approach mode, the enemy will use its ranged attacks occasionally but much less often than in ranged mode - presumably this is to make it more "persistent" against players who try to run away (since while it's in its firing animation, it's not chasing you), while at the same time still attacking so as to at least wing them while they run.

If an enemy is in melee range, it goes into melee mode. It will prefer its melee attacks while in melee mode, but will not use them exclusively. Not much to say here. Since the majority of enemies have better melee than ranged combat, they will try to get in with approach so that they can switch to the more effective melee.


Now, what's interesting here is that approach mode is actually much safer for the player than ranged or melee. The problem is that, under normal circumstances, approach mode doesn't last very long before melee range is reached. Slows will help, but you need to run around a lot to keep them at that range, which means you're not attacking. Basically, I've seen two ways to consistently keep an enemy in approach mode. The first is knockback/repel. I honestly think that approach mode does as for an energy blaster's survival as the actual knockdown time, and a stormy running Hurricane is much safer on the ground than hovering out of reach - if you hover, enemies go into ranged mode and pelt you with bullets and boulders, while on the ground they'll keep seeing a path to you, try to take it, get repelled, and stay in approach mode the whole time with attacks being sparse. (The to-hit debuff helps too, of course. )

The other way I've seen is avoidance patches - caltrops are the star for me here, with long duration, fast recharge, a slowing component and quick animation. If you place them right, enemies can spend a long time running a few steps onto the caltrops, realizing their feet hurt, turning back, running away, realizing they want to kill you, and running back onto the caltrops to repeat the process. The entire time they are in approach mode, and will fire on you relatively slowly even though there is no -rech component to caltrops. If you hover up out of range, this process breaks as they switch to ranged mode and fire on you much more often.


So, tl;dr version: Yes, as far as I can tell a slow reduces the number of incoming attacks more than an immob does for as long as the enemy retains a perceived path of approach and does not reach melee range. However, with a few exceptions this is difficult to properly leverage; an immobed enemy will stay immobed pretty much as long as you feel like, while a slowed enemy will still reach melee range unless you stop attacking to run away.

For even more fun, imagine two Storm defenders fighting each other.

Well, I mean it's certainly feasible to determine who wins in a contest where they both stand there punching each other, and there might be some useful data about attack/defense balance there (for Scrapper v. Scrapper, Tank v. Scrapper, Scrapper v. Tank, either v. Brute, etc) but it's about the same as the Pylon Challenge. The problem is that the idea starts running into issues as soon as you have two characters who fight at different ranges such that one makes an active effort to maintain distance (Blaster v. Scrapper). This starts getting less and less feasible the further your options get from a straight slugfest. A /dev blaster using caltrops, smokebomb + cloaking device, and so on is going to be a nightmare to model, as will just about any AT with access to defender or controller sets.

That's.. extremely ambitious and probably unworkable, at least in a way that would give useful information.

I wouldn't expect them to, just noting a reason against those arguing for a change.

The European viper (vipera berus) and the common lizard (zootoca vivipara) both live north of the arctic circle, as do numerous cold-blooded frogs.

It was the "ice age" comment that was baffling.

..all of them?

Saying that "reptiles didn't make it out of the Ice Age" is a baffling statement. Clearly they did or there wouldn't be any today.

..you do know that there are reptiles today, right? Snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and those frigging tuataras. Are you thinking of a word that isn't "reptile"?

If it triggered on a kill, you couldn't do the thing where one enemy is standing a bit apart and the others are facing away from him, and when you shank him the others don't even notice (the fear/debuff would agg them anyway). It's not reliable, but it's fun when it happens and I'd hate to see it go.

No offense, but if you're on a difficulty level where you can't take out a high-priority minion pretty quickly after you've shanked the spawn leader, then either your difficulty is high enough that changing fear wouldn't help or there are some serious problems with how you're playing.

Edit: Or the spawn is an ambush and you didn't notice the sapper on his way in, which can happen. If the spawn isn't an ambush and you didn't notice the sapper, why not? You're invisible until you strike and you should be evaluating the spawn for prime targets anyway.

Something to note with Cold Domination: you left Infrigidate (and single-target powers in general) off your table, and it's a -87.5% that's perma with the default slot (for controllers, at least). As a result CD is somewhat better against AVs than the table makes it look.

(Of course, Ice Control is also even better against single targets than you make it look, and it already looks pretty good: Chilblain and Block of Ice are also self-stacking single target -rech you can cram in between all the others if you're so inclined.)

I tend to think of the lifespan of a character rather than only play at 41+. From 1-31 an ice or earth controller's damage is a joke unless the secondary is /kin, /storm or /sonic, and from 32-40 it's still the pet doing most of your damage.

As for the statement earlier that a blaster's is less useful because "it won't be enough to cancel out Hurricane", it seems to me that when the debuff is that huge any degree to which you can counter it is valuable.

My new favorite way to get around is to turn my camera 180 degrees so I can see where I'm going and run backwards while tapping jump with Ninja Run active.

It doesn't help much that the primary influence sink (enhancements) has been largely supplanted by IOs, which mainly push inf from one player to another instead of sinking it.

If you recolor it white, you can show people just how seriously you take your snowball fights.

Well, you can but it's not as unpleasant as this would make it. Unless you decided to screw around with Microfilaments I guess.