Biowraith

Probably my favourite character is my Crab Spider, and a large part of that is the aesthetic - when I first hit 24 (which was early on enough that I hadn't seen anyone else's in action), way before I'd IO'd him out to be the tankmage he is now, my reaction would best be described as "glee", purely on how he looked in combat.

I just love having this hulking power-armoured juggernaut of destruction* unloading volleys of AoE death on a spawn before charging in to carve up any survivors with those highly satisfying slashy stabby crab arms. Add to that the spiderbot army, the flashy-if-mediocre Omega Maneuver, and hell even the animation for Serum, and it all just looks so damn cool to me.

*I picked the Huge model, and pushed most of the sliders to or near maximum - I pay for it in confined spaces like cave maps, but it's totally worth it.


Others that I like the visuals of are:
Dual Pistols - a bit over the top and silly, but that's a plus point when looking for "flashy".

Fire Blast/Melee - Especially with the extra particle stuff added since launch, these powers just feel satisfyingly burny and destructive. Very quickly into the fight it's like everyone and everything in the area is on fire.

Energy Blast - bright explosions, bodies sent flying, can't ask for much more (Nova especially).

Radiation Blast - the nuke is an actual nuke! The other powers look pretty flashy too - X-Ray, Proton Volley, Neutron Bomb, Irradiate.

Robotics - can't beat a robot army, and the Assault Bot is suitably intimidating.

There's a bunch of other individual powers that I enjoy (Dart Burst, Crane Kick, Solar Flare, Static Discharge, etc etc), but the above are probably the sets I'd use if I were showing someone the game.

Inspired by real life. The Mr. Johnson in the song references Dr. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon who, in discussing work to develop robotic combatants has indeed been quoted as saying "there are no legal prohibitions against robots making life-and-death decisions".


(personally I like Melora/Rasputina)

Regarding Kin's mitigation or lack thereof, I actually find it to be one of the strongest sets for AVs. Sure, it's only 20% (25% on Defenders I think?) for an application of Fulcrum Shift, but it stacks with itself, and also with Siphon Power. With a bit of +recharge (some of which Kin provides itself) it's not too difficult to get to the -damage cap of 90%, and the way -damage is resisted means AVs usually resist it a lot less than other debuffs (though there are a handful of exceptions). So long as you can survive the initial 20-30 seconds of setup, most AVs are declawed nicely by Kin (especially when pairing the debuffs with one of the strongest AoE heals in the game).

It's actually the big spawns of minions and such that I find Kin's mitigation to be weak against (though not non-existent as one poster suggested). It's kinda like Poison in that the aoe mitigation it brings is great if layering with other things, but not so much on its own, and Kin's only going to be layering it on one or two targets in the spawn. I guess enthusiastic applications of Repel would help there, though that's still risky and can be tricky to do without also affecting kill speed (which is half the appeal of Kin, after all).

My first instinct, without giving it any *real* thought, was Mind/Emp controller. Mind because powers to put people to sleep or confuse them seemed quite appropriate. Empathy just because quite a lot of settings depict faerie types as having beneficial magic (possibly not the actual folklore, but certainly fantasy settings for various books, games, etc), and heals/buffs fits that.

On reading the thread, Plant seems a good fit too. Illusion as a general concept fits better than Mind, except I don't really think the specific depictions of decoys and phantasms in this game feel very pixie-ish.

If we're talking the proper pure-hearted all out goodness variety of hero, then save the family. You rescue those who are definitely about to die and then do your best to prevent the possible/probable deaths that might follow from your nemesis escaping. You don't let an innocent (or if we're really goody-goody, a villain) die if you can prevent it. If you have a choice of a definite death or potential death(s), you prevent the definite death - the potential deaths might never happen (and there's still the possibility of preventing them too), but the definite one is here and now and needs to be stopped.. And it doesn't actually matter that it's your family in particular that are about to die, the same is true whoever it is.


But I don't think I'm that pure-hearted all out goodness variety. My world view falls a lot more in line with the more pragmatic realistic approach which says pick the option that will (likely) prevent the most deaths. If the nemesis has been killing people previously, and it's been tough to track down and catch them, then unless you have good reason to believe one of the above will change you can be pretty sure they'll kill more before you catch them again. So, assuming the time-to-catch:nemesis-kill-rate is higher than one family, you go with the option that saves the most lives in the long run, which is take down the nemesis. People are going to die either way, and all you can really hope for is damage control.

That said, I do still feel a certain draw towards the uncompromising approach of the former - that you save the person needing saved right now, no matter the consequences further down the line. Even if you know that ultimately it will (probably) mean a greater number of people die, you never knowingly let the ones here and now perish. You can't control the future, only what you do right now, so you always pick what's "right" then and there. Plus I'm not sure I'm swayed by the idea that X deaths is better than X+Y deaths. I'm not sure how easily I could explain it, but in my head it feels like a single person dying is the same as ten thousand people dying is the same as ten million people dying, that volume does not make it any worse.

So to be honest, I have no idea which I'd actually pick if I somehow found myself in that scenario.

It varies somewhat with powerset - some have slots to burn, while others never have enough - but generally I'm glad for the extra slots in the 32-50 stretch. Up until that point I'm usually gaining new powers faster than I can slot old ones to my satisfaction - I'll have the basic function of the power capped, sure, but I won't usually have added the extra recharge, endurance reduction, etc, that I'd like. e.g. for melee characters that attack power at 26 comes at a point where I'm wanting to round out the 1-20 attacks I took, but I have to delay that because I don't want to underslot the new shiny.

So yeah, I appreciate the shift from powers to slots after 32, it lets me either further enhance my strongest powers, or bring up the weaker powers to useful levels, along with adding procs and uniques where applicable.

But as I say, it varies somewhat from powerset to powerset - the above doesn't apply so much if it's an early blooming powerset that doesn't take too much slotting; in that scenario I can see those last 20 levels starting to feel like a drawn out slog. On the other hand my Crab Spider valued those levels just as much as the ones where he was gaining new powers frequently, because he was rounding out his build and improving his performance all the way to 50.

Other possibilities include leaving a trail of mines leading to your pull position so the first enemy gets killed (or knocked back) by the first mine, and then the next enemy hits the second mine, and so forth.

Or when you're going to be fighting a single hard target (e.g. an EB), set up a lot of mines on one spot to quickly remove a big chunk of their health as soon as combat begins.

Although, both of those options tend to be pretty inefficient in terms of time spent setting up and tend to be better suited to builds/ATs that are not as solo friendly as an MM tends to be - you're usually better/faster to just start a straight fight if your character can handle it (and MM's generally can), rather than spend ages setting up elaborate trap fields. But if that one EB is giving you trouble, it can still be a very effective option.

(oh, and on teams if we're pulling the spawn, or tank is herding, I like to spend that wait time dropping a trip mine or two - might not even be triggered in the fight, but on the other hand might blow up an enemy that was about to melee a squishy teammate)

Lay it in the middle of the spawn.

Procs are a chance when they hit the target. DoTs only officially "hit" on the first tick (even ones like Hail of Bullets where not every tick might apply).

There's special cases for toggles and "patch" type powers, where it's every 10 seconds (starting from when you first activate the power for patches, not so sure about toggles).


So yeah, Longfang will just get a chance on the first tick of damage, not every one.

My current placeholder chars awaiting the relevant powersets are:

Billy the Corpse - Pistols/Poison Corruptor

Mad Jack McMad - Street Fighting/Willpower Brute (must include a headbutt somehow, and ideally some kind of charge/rush power)

And an alternative Biowraith - Dark/Dark Controller


Used to have a lot more placeholders, but happily Going Rogue made many of them possible.

I can't really remember hitting 50 the first time - I mean I know which character it was, and roughly how long into my subscription it happened, but that's about it. I'm not even 100% sure whether I got there before or after Kheldians were introduced.

So possibly as a result of that I never felt any kind of slight or dismay at the level requirement being reduced. Or perhaps it's just because I never really viewed 50 as an "accomplishment" of any real meaning, even within the context of computer games (and even if I did, I'd be scoffing at the time it takes today's 50s anyway - in my day it was uphill both ways in the caltrops, etc etc ), so didn't really view things unlocked by getting there as something worked for, earned, or otherwise considered special.

The significant owl hoots in the night