Berzerker_NA

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  1. There was another discussion about this, and a poster posted a screen shot where he'd gotten 2 of them to stack once, but he said it was really really rare for it to happen. (It might even be a glitch.)

    So, yeah, it's unlikely you'll get it to stack. I still put one both on my spec ops, and my basic soldiers, but not on my commando.
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lxndr View Post
    3) I've lived with that since I made this guy the first time. It's a frustrating stigma. I think he holds his own as an Ill/FF, and I hope he'll hold his own as a Thugs/FF as well.
    It's not fun to team with people who think it's only about holding their own. But, if that's your play attitude then taking shields isn't going to change it. It will still be your attitude.


    Quote:

    I suppose my next question is: is this soft cap really important? I mean, I'm sure it's nice. But, should I be chasing it? What happens if I stay at that 40.72% instead of going to the soft cap?
    At soft cap, you only get hit one time out of 20. At 40.72%, it's almost twice as often, nearly one time out of 10. So, your defensive power is doubling in that last 5%.

    With bubbles, dispersion bubble, and pet procs, you can greatly exceed the 45% limit, which is really good if you're facing an enemy that debuffs defense, or is able to impart a toHit bonus to itself.
  3. I don't know that everyone is doing it for the adventure, or even the pay out. Sometimes it's just fun to hang out with people and do something you can do on autopilot whilst talking about odd stuff.

    Min/maxers get tiresome, though. That's why I avoid AE like the plague. There's probably even some good arcs, but I don't want to get sucked into another AE farm. I want to bore myself, I'll do like the OP seems to be suggesting: work some overtime in RL. Then maybe I can buy some booster packs or something.
  4. I often resort to using a thesaurus, but my favorite names didn't come from there. It will be really nice when we get free monthly server transfers, so I can change names on some old toons that just didn't work out for me.

    I have a pretty easy time making up names for fire and ice characters, because there are a lot of words that go with "Fire" or "Frost". Others can definitely be more difficult.

    Lady Larceny Thugs MM -Virtue

    Shoguness Ninjas MM - Virtue

    Wicked Winds /Storm - Virtue

    Rift Wraith Energy/Dark Brute - Virtue

    Baroness Von Bolt - Virtue, Trying to come up with a new build for her.

    Baron Von Blitzkrieg - Pinnacle. Dark/Rifle

    And my favorite:

    Doctor Deviance - (Reserved on all the NA servers)

    My first toon on this account was Brimstone Berzerker, hence the online name.
  5. You realize how annoying it would be if all the powers from all the packs immediately entered your tray at the appropriate levels? For someone like me that owns most of the packs, that would be a lot of tedium every time I make a character. First off, the powers will appear wherever they fit, and I have to move them. Second, I may not want to use them all.

    Self Destruct always appears on my power bar the moment my new character enters tutorial, right where I usually put my primary attack. You know how many times I have accidentally blown myself up?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Liz Bathory View Post

    Also.. Steampunk Shirts are completely broken.
    Actually they're not missing. They're not actually shirt options. They're chest detail options that fit over the top of your shirt.

    For example, the Bustier. If you're making a female toon, just choose the "Eden" skin top option and then choose Bustier in Chest details, and it will be visible. Or you can mix and match it with whatever shirt you want.
  6. Perhaps going for Metropolis, and missing a syllable.
  7. So does anyone know how many powers you'll need to get the 5th travel now? Will you need three prereqs, or just 2?
  8. Berzerker_NA

    Wrong protocol?

    Was having the same problem I think. I had to force launch because the updater wasn't working, and naturally found I had the wrong protocol due to not patching. Then I logged onto to forums, and tried again and now it's patching. Weird. I don't know if logging in made a difference, or if it was just random luck.
  9. I have a thugz/pain too. I don't understand why you would go with mace mastery, exactly. I guess just to softcap defense?

    Taking something with a resistance, like Soul Mastery, Mu Mastery, or Sharks would allow you to stack resistances with World of Pain. That's what I'm thinking I'll do. I'd try out the new Ancillary powers, but an AOE immobilize is just so nice for thugs, so they'll stay together a little better.
  10. Suggestion: Give MM's a power or slash command that places an immobilize effect on their own pets. Maybe the AI can't be fixed easily, but it doesn't matter what the AI wants to do if the AI is powerless to do it anyway.


    Imagine if they just gave us a temp power where you just tap the button and all of a sudden each of your pets is struck by a 1000 magnitude immobilize (as if an enemy had cast an AOE immobilize on them, only stronger). I don't know how hard that would be to rig up, but it seems like it would be just the same as any of the other temp powers we've been getting lately. Of course, we'd also need a power that undoes it.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by InfamousBrad View Post

    Mercenaries, balance issue: Because it seldom lasts long enough to kill an Elite Boss or an Archvillain, Serum actually reduces the effectiveness of the target you cast it on - once the duration runs out, it zeroes out the minion's endurance, dropping that one minion's DPS to zero for the rest of the fight. At a bare minimum, it needs its duration increased by at least 50%, preferably doubled, or else it needs the endurance crash removed.
    You could just give him a blue insp, you know. If he's got decent end redux slotted, that's all it will take to make him work again. I've taken to doing that in TF's or on teams. In solo play I usually have to resummon my whole team in situations where I would use it, because it means I just aggroed multiple spawns.


    Quote:
    Poison, bug: Noxious Gas doesn't display the Real Numbers values for the pseudo-pet it creates, making the Real Numbers info display for the power completely useless.
    Yeah. It's crazy trying to get reliable numbers on that power! I tried the attack dummy in Vanguard base, but then I remembered that they're level 35, and clearly I was level 38, so the numbers get adjusted for level difference.



    Quote:

    Poison, balance issue: Poison relies very heavily on single-target debuffs, Envenom and Weaken, despite the fact that the only times in the entire game that you ever fight a single target for very long, that target has 85% debuff resistance. Some percentage of the Envenom and Weaken debuffs needs to bypass debuff resistance.
    Either that or be stackable. In Single play I play with bosses enabled, so I get a good value out of debuffing the boss at the outset of every battle, but it's very unfortunate that you can't stack it.
  12. Can someone explain these procs in detail? I'm having a hard time finding any information on Paragonwiki. What are you guys talking about?
  13. Suggestion for Epic stuff:

    Give tier 1 henchmen for high level MM's an abnormally high HP for their level, and perhaps balance it by giving them less damage. It gets tiresome resummoning all the the time if every boss AOE is going to wipe out your entire first tier of pets.
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Yomo_Kimyata View Post
    Could you expound on this? What do you mean by "crashing the market"? Normally I would expect that to be an attempt to drive prices lower, but I didn't think that was what you were trying to prove/figure out. In fact, I thought you were trying to control a market in order to raise prices. I'm a little confused, I guess, so I apologize for any misconceptions.
    Good point. I guess it's the opposite of crashing.

    Update: Friday evening I decided to take the plunge and spent 4 million inf to clear out all the Temporal sands that had been listed for less than 10,000 inf. That still leaves 300 offers from other sellers. I relisted 210 of them of my own for 10,000 each, and ... to my amazement... I sold 6 of them!!!!!!

    So, then I took them back down and relisted them for 12,500. Haven't sold any at that price.

    Basically I've spent a total of about 5 million inf so far, and made 54,000 inf back. So the experiment is not going well. If something changes, I am taking screenshots now and I'll start posting them, but right now it just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. Why do all that just to document a failure?
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Residentx_EU View Post
    Equip Mercs - when I first used this I thought all mercs got upgraded. When I used this they all got helmets but the wiki says only one does.

    http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mercenaries
    Yeah. They don't look very different, but they are different. They gain additional power from both tactical upgrade and equip. (Mostly they get new attacks, which make able to deal more damage.)

    For example: you'll notice after you use tactical upgrade that your Spec Ops get stealthy.


    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ShadowsBetween View Post

    Serum is your "utility" power. This is a single target buff that you can cast on one of your pets. Unfortunately, it has almost more drawbacks than benefits. First, it is on an *extremely* long recharge timer, long enough to make it a "once per mission" power. Second, the power has a "crash" effect when it wears off. It will improve the damage out put of a pet while it is active, and then it will basically cripple the pet when it wears off. (The effect is severe enough that it's usually faster to dismiss a pet and summon and equip a new one than to wait for the pet to recover.)
    Or you could just hand him a blue inspiration. If you've slotted for end reduction, a small blue should be enough to get him started and he'll just keep regenerating back toward full after that.
  16. I usually slot 1 pet that way (the tier 3 one, actually). And I agree you're right Blood Mandate has awesome bonuses (I also like how it doesn't use the super rare salvage to make it).

    However, you would not want to play mercs without the Achilles Heel and Lady Gray procs on the lower tier pets. It's a huge difference in playability!

    And, at this point, given peoples' answers I'm now druling over the possibility of giving them to my Enforcers on my Thugz MM, then purpling them up on the last 2 slots.
  17. Someday I will learn the ways of build posting. ....

    My Ninja/FF skipped Genin. Huge difference in the playability! With just the 3 elite pets, I hardly ever have to resummon anything. Jounin can soft cap pretty easily. Oni's tough enough to handle getting hit every now and again. All 3 pets deal wonderfully massive damage, and keep dealing it.

    And I don't do the "tankermind" thing. They're always on aggressive. Life is fast.
  18. Ok, screen shots are in the works. I've taken them, but now I have to figure out how to post them, and I'm just lazy. I know there are sites that will host that stuff.

    So far experiment #1 (Crashing the market) has made no progress in a week's time. I was crashing Temporal Sands. I managed to drop the number of offers from 2700 to 1050 during the first three days, but it hasn't budged all week since then. It's about 1150 now, but 100 of those are my offers at 10,000. (None have sold at that price yet.)


    I was buying them at 500, and I netted about 600 of them at that price, but I decided to move the price up to 1001 a couple days ago because other buyers were adapting to my price. Vendor price is 1000 inf. So far I have refused to pay more than 3000 to buy up the existing supply.

    Possible next move: Maybe I'll break down and spend more money by buying up stock that's listed above 3000. Maybe I'll go up to 10,000 and see if that breaks me. (It could theoretically cost up 10 million.... which I'd be very lucky to make back.)

    Experiment #2 went really well. (Safeguarding the price of Human Blood Samples)

    The toon that posted 100 of them at 20,000 each hardly makes any sales. That should mean the price has been staying within that range.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lewisite View Post
    Hi Guys.

    Which leads to the bigger problems of the set -- its complete and utter lack of damage mitigation. Like I said this is worse with Poison since Poison has none of this either (if only I knew back then what I know now!). But with any secondary, your boys will die. Just when you start to do some damage to your enemy, a couple of your guys are gonna drop dead, cut your damage output, you can't beat their regen, then the battle is thrown and thats that. You can't beat their regen even with /Poison's -regen ability, which doesn't work on EB's or even L54 bosses worth a spit.
    This is where serum becomes valuable. It's an AV killer power. You rarely ever use it (because you *can't* use it very often with that 16 minute recharge), but when you do, you can get a second wind.

    Just drop it on the Commando, heal him to full health and tell him to attack the toughest mob. I put 5 slots on it, so it puts his resistances at the 90% resistance cap. I can usually be pretty confident he's not going to go down until it runs out. Meanwhile, I retreat back a good distance away and start resummoning the rest of my crew as they die. When he crashes, I dismiss him and resummon him to, then equip them all before the mobs get up to me.

    A third of the time, he kills the AV on his own. Another third of the time, my newly resummoned crew kills him (it helps that my newly resummoned Spec Ops have their mezzes recharged). The rest of the time I run for my life.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Jibikao View Post
    I agree that Merc/Storm is probably one of the better combos for Merc. My first lvl 50 is actually a Merc/Poison and /Poison sucks so hard. /Poison lacks aoe protection for pets. It's good when you solo at x1 but other secondaries allow you to solo x4 or higher. I would say my Merc/Storm is at least x2 better than my Merc/Poison.
    I love my mercs/poison, but I have to admit you are right about the lack of AOE mitigation. I was so desperate I gave in and took poison trap. I could handle +1/x2 after that, but only if I concentrated real hard on what I was doing the whole time.

    I took the Heat Mastery ancillary at level 41, and Bonfire is helping things a lot. It's wicked awesome on this build.
  21. I had thought there was actually a problem with it, like you didn't get your set bonuses, or the enhancements don't actually do anything. It's really just because of a preference?

    For example: I use a lot of procs on my tier 1 mercs. They've got Achilles Heel Chance for Resistance Debuff, Touch of the Lady Gray Chance for Negative Energy Damage, Edict of the Master 5% Defense Bonus for pets, and I'd like to give them Sovereign Right 10% increased Resistance. That would only leave me 2 slots to enhance their damage, end, and attack bonus. It would be nice to be able to put a monster enhancement in those two slots.

    A better example would be Thugs Enforcers. You want to put defense enhances on them for their Maneuvers power, and the two Def Debuff procs would be handy on them as well.
  22. What happens when you put a purple (the level 50 purples, not the PVP ones) on a tier 1 or tier 2 pet? I keep hearing that there is a problem with doing that, because even when you're level 50, your tier 1 pets are 2 levels below you, and your tier 2 pet is one level below you. (Am I using those terms right? Is tier 1 your weakest pets, and tier 3 your strongest single pet, or am I using the terms backwards?)
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by je_saist View Post

    The information derived from that test basically said this:

    If / When Mastermind Pets are made customizable, options will be limited.
    • Robots will only get mechanical parts.
    • Ninja's will only get oriental costumes.
    • Thugs will only get street clothes
    • Mercs will only get military uniform parts
    • Necro probably would only get some model selections.
    The conceptual idea is that players would still be able to identify what type of mastermind a player was by their pets. There should not be a case where a Thugs pet looks like a Merc pet, or a Ninja Pet looks like a Necro pet.

    I'm going to assume that like Necro, Demon Summoning would only receive some different models, rather than exposing costume parts.
    I'd rather if they just gave us full pet costumes, with no specific customization. Either that, or at least a few key options:

    Robots: Cyborgs!!! Or Golemns!!
    Ninjas: Inner city kids wearing karate outfits (so not necessarily oriental).
    Thugs: Mafia suits
    Mercs: Tights, so they look like supervillain henchmen.
    Necro: Ghost Pirates!!!!
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Beef_Cake View Post
    Actully for the past 2 Issues, a buff Icon will display in your buff bar and you can also view the combat attributes window for the same thing. I sat there for an hour and never seen it trigger for the Enforcers.

    After that, I sat there for another 20 minutes casting the Enforcers and finally it triggered on Me after casting the Enforcers, so yeah, my previous post is correct. It doesn't work for the Enforcers, only the caster.
    Did you watch for the proc icon, or just look at their damage bonus to see if it suddenly changes?