ClawsandEffect

I reiterate that the weakest combo doesn't exist yet.

As of I16 the weakest soloing combo will be an Empathy/Assault Rifle Defender.

I honestly can't think of a combo that would solo slower or more painfully, while having difficulty remaining vertical.

Won't be too horrible on teams, but solo it would blow gigantic chunks.

I have my name already. I'm not going to mention it because I don't have the space to placehold it.

I use global almost exclusively. I haven't changed my tabs much from the default.

Upper window is: rewards, NPC banter, broadcast, consignment house, request, global notification (GM notices and whatnot), and my global channels

Lower window is: team, local, SG, Coalition, PMs

I have it set up like that so all the information I need is in the upper window, which I can ignore if I choose, and the chat channels I'm paying more attention to are in the lower window, where I can see the important strategy bits of conversation without it getting swallowed by global channels and broadcast.

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Posts like this make me just want to go to Atlas and spam 'THERE ARE LIKE A ZILLION OTHER ZONES IN THE GAME WITH STUFF TO KILL. PLEASE GO LOOK AT THEM IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN ONE.' for a few hours a day.

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........And you would get people complaining that they can't organize their AE farms with you babbling that useless information.

Everyone knows that AE is the entire game, you don't really think you're going to fool them into sacrificing a couple xp/hour to go prove you wrong do you?

Traps/Archery Defender?

Ooh, I know!

Empathy/Assault Rifle


Do I win?

You seem to have missed the part where I said I wouldn't be upset if blasters got the heal. You're trying to argue with someone who is not taking that different of a position than you.

I don't CARE whether or not blasters get a 10% heal that requires a to-hit check.

I'm just saying that based on past history they are unlikely to get it. That's all.

I never once said that a self heal alone would make a blaster overpowered. What I said was that a self heal in combination with other factors has the potential to make a blaster overpowered.

You seem to think I'm against them getting it, when I'm just making the point that it seems improbable that they will.

Edit: I also never took PvP into consideration with any of my posts. It is at most 5% of the game, I was looking at the other 95%.

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the Invention Origin Enhancement system is completely skippable

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This is very true. I wasn't trying to imply that it was mandatory or necessary. Just that, in order to determine whether yuo want to use a feature, you should at least make yourself familiar with that feature instead of making an uninformed decision.

OP: Since you're here asking questions you're already on the "right" path. A lot of new players go straight into the AE building and never leave. There's nothing wrong with AE, I play in it on a regular basis.

The catch there is that AE itself doesn't expose you to a lot of the things in the game that you would see or learn just by playing. If you browse the forums you'll find thread after thread after thread full of people complaining about AE creating players with high level characters that have little or no idea how to do anything outside of the AE building.

Once again, I'm not saying AE is bad, just that jumping into it right away isn't the best way to learn the game if that is what you want to do. many new players coming over from other games (coughWoWcough) think that they have to get to level 50 as fast as possible to get to the fun part of the game. What they don't realize is that CoH doesn't work like that. The whole game is the fun part.

So, what I'm basically saying is, don't get sucked into AE to the point that it's all you do. If you do that you will miss a LOT of cool stuff, because you skipped past the levels the game introduces you to it in.

Well, it's actually a cigar.

Because cigars are the classic symbol of being distinguished.

Distinguished by the foul odor following you around.

Which is ironic, I smoke cigarettes and I hate the way 99% of cigars smell. And many people feel the opposite. And many others hate them both.

Malses should at least get parrots for their shoulder to go with all the pirate options.

I do agree that it's silly that only females can have shoulder pets, and only males and huges can smoke.

Heh, although I did just get an interesting idea for a gender switching character.

A girl with a shoulder kitty that is actually a werecat and has a male or huge costume option for it's shifted form. (The shoulder kitty would actually be the character in this case)

Salvage is used for crafting Inventions, which can be costume pieces, or more commonly, Invention origin enhancements.

They are enhancements that you cannot outlevel like normal ones, and some of them come in sets, which give you bonuses depending on how many of a particular set you have in a power. There's an invention tutorial that will unlock when you hit level 10, I strongly suggest you run through it at least once.

If you buy the full game you do NOT have to reinstall it, you just need to upgrade your trial account to a full account, which I believe you do from your master NCSoft account (I never had a trial account, so I'm a little fuzzy on this one)

Yes, the free month will stack with your trial time, and no, it will not have the trial limitations, you will be able to do anything in the game anyone else can do.

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There's definitely no design rule that says blast sets can't have utility, and I don't think a self-heal is a particularly special form of utility. Heck, corruptors got to keep it.

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I won't be upset if blasters get to keep it, I'll just be very surprised if the devs allow it.

Corruptors get to keep it because they have a buff/debuff secondary, making them a sort of reverse defender.

Why strip the heal out of a primary set in an AT that has a heal in more than half it's secondaries?

Blasters are not known for healing ability (self or otherwise) without dipping into the Medicine pool. It can be safely assumed that since they never have gotten a self heal power built into a set before, that they were never intended to get one.

I will be even MORE surprised if they give Life Drain the Siphon Life treatment.

Also, it is my opinion, based on the layout of the powers, that Rad Blast was intended to be a blaster set in the first place.
My reasoning:

1) It has Aim. Not a strong indication in and of itself, but it adds weight to my case.

2) Set up with 3 ST attacks, one of which is very powerful and short range.

3) A cone attack, in this case a decently damaging one that does knockback.

4) Targeted AoE. A staple of every blast set except Sonic and Dark.

5) A PBAoE. Not a common attack in a blast set, but it has precedent in Electric.

6) A snipe that comes much later in the set. If you look at the 2 sets that seem intended to be Defender-only in the beginning(Dark and Psi), you will notice that both of them get their snipe very early. Rad Blast gets it's snipe much later.

Radiation Blast looks (in power layout) more like Energy or Fire Blast than it does Psi or Dark (which I believe were supposed to be Defender-exclusive)

So why didn't blasters get Radiation Blast from the beginning?

I theorize that, given the way the game was being designed at that point, blasters didn't get Rad Blast because they had no thematic pairing for it in a manipulation set.

Lets look at blaster pairings at launch:

Fire Blast/Fire Manipulation
Ice Blast/Ice Manipulation
Electric Blast/Electric Manipulation
Energy Blast/Energy Manipulation
Assault Rifle/Devices

Sonic and Archery didn't exist at launch, and I think blasters probably only got them so they wouldn't scream that defenders got something they didn't. The lack of thematically paired secondaries lends weight to that as well.

The devs really seem to like pairing powersets up by element, in cases where there is an elemental component. Obviously weapons don't count toward any particular element. Any time there is a pair of sets that share an element within a specific AT, and that set is ported, BOTH sets get ported instead of just a primary or secondary. Fire Melee/Fiery Aura, Dark/Dark, TA/A, etc.

Since they never made a Radiation Manipulation set blasters got screwed out of the set at the beginning because the devs at the time didn't want a set in an AT that didn't have an elemental match.

The only things likely to change are the animation/root times on the tier 1 and 2 powers for defiance conformation. Probably a 2 and 4-5 second recharge on them.

The blaster damage mod will increase the damage enough that they shouldn't have to adjust damage scales, and the blaster debuff mod will reduce the amount of -def all on it's own.

They specifically went for sets they wouldn't have to do a lot of work on to port because they're busy with power customization and (presumably) Going Rogue. So, in light of that, I don't think Rad will be getting the Psi treatment, especially seeing as they're not trying to cobble together a secondary using some of the attacks from the set.

Yes, HOs can be merged, I think.

The +3 HOs came from an exploit in the early days of the Hami raid involving exemping just before he dropped. You can't get them anymore, so the ones floating around are a finite amount.

It does give you the option of having a non-Tae Kwon Do martial artist though. Which I definitely like.

Erm, I've never really had a problem teaming with MMs.

I hate playing them, which was what I thought the thread was about (based on the title), but I've never had any particular issue with teaming with them. The only time it's ever a problem for me is when there are more than 2, and that's only because the syetem I play on can't handle the extra lag all the pets running around causes.

The only brute I have at a decently high level is DM/SR...so I'm not exactly throwing a whole lot of AoE around

I usually play my stalker paired with my wife's MM, we have pretty well defined roles in that situation. She lets her pets go nuts on the minions and LTs while I systematically murder the harder targets that her pets have trouble whittling down fast enough. Works like a charm.

OP: I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you hate Energy blasters too. Especially when tanking, because no team can function without a tank gathering everything up before anyone attacks, right?

With the Super Strength animations I may be willing to make a tank or brute with the set. Maybe a classic Invuln/SS tank, since the new animations fit my idea of a classic Golden Age superhero much better than the current ones.

Words fail to describe how much I hate the original SS animations. Especially the Punch animation.

The MA animation options will be nice for a MA/WP character that has never had any formal training, just lots of fighting experience. I will probably be swapping all of the animations out for that character. I'll be rerolling my current DB/WP into MA/WP because the animation options fit the concept 100x better.

It will probably be for Corruptors, Blasters and Defenders.

They may give it to corruptors first and proliferate the other two shortly afterward, but it would really make more sense to just give it to everyone who is getting it all at once.

They also haven't explicitly stated that those are the only sets we're getting with Going Rogue. Those are just the only ones they've said anything about.

Taking into account that Going Rogue is going to be a paid expansion, I would almost expect every AT to get a new powerset.

So far we know about 2. Whether or not there will be any others is open to speculation.

There will probably be more options to do things like that in the future, but for now we're kind of limited on NPC placement.

You CAN, however, set roughly where in the mission you want named bosses or custom bosses to appear. With the Front, Middle, and Back options you can set approximately where they will be.

Maybe we'll get more control of spawn points in the future, but I'm not going to say we are for sure because no one but the devs knows for sure, and they're not saying much about it at the moment.

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Can you hear that sound? It's the game tearing itself into two factions...AE babies and players.

It's a rift that may cause long term discord. I already find myself checking vet badges when I invite to teams.

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That's probably the dumbest way to check to see if someone knows how to play, and has been ever since i8 when the vet badges went in.

But hey, no big loss - people that know how to play probably don't want to team with you, either.

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I do the same thing. It's not a surefire way of telling anything, but it gives you a clue as to how much to expect from them.

Definitely not foolproof though, I've met players with no vet badges that were pretty good, and I've met players with 42 months worth that were idiots.

An EAT with no vet badges is a good sign of an AE baby though, especially if they're high level.

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Or the every boy band song ever.

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I haven't laughed that hard in a looooong time. The funniest part of it is that it is textbook R&B songwriting.

Run missions with your defenses and resists turned off, teamed with a Pain Dom character to keep you alive. Should speed up your progress a little.

As an added bonus...you'll get the debt badges faster too!

Edit: For the record, my main is also a Regen scrapper, and I believe he has Unbreakable as well. Only 89,000,000 damage to go for Immortal...woohoo!!!

The devs don't really want us transfering stuff between toons. If they did, some sort of feature like this would already exist. They can't do anything about third party trades, so that is probably going to remain your only option.

Influence transfers have a valid story-related reason for not existing. Influence and infamy technically aren't physical money. They are the willingness of others to do things or provide things for your character based on respect or fear.

Because Claws and Effect stopped a bank robbery doesn't mean people will do things for Marshall Stack because of it.

I look at third party transfers as the first character (who has the influence) talks about the second (who you are sending it to) to the third person, who then tells other people about things the second character has done (hence their increase of influence)

Simply put, if the devs wanted us to be able to do this, we already would be able to, and your post never would have happened.

Since they don't, we can't, and it did.

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they gave CLAWS, range powers, what makes you think they wont ?

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Devs have said it's never going to happen. Blasters will get Dual Pistols, Corruptors will get Dual Pistols, Defenders will probably get Dual Pistols, Scrappers will never get Dual Pistols

I'm too lazy to find the post saying so (if it hasn't been purged) but at least one dev has outright said it's never going to happen.

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It's just so dull and uninteresting, even without being a flimsy duplicate of the stalker inherent.

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You have it backwards there Rigel. Stalkers were given an upgraded version of the scrapper inherent because before they got it they were just barely this side of useless on teams.

It is impossible for the scrapper inherent to be a duplicate of the stalker inherent, because they had it first.

If I could change anything, all I would do is leave the percentage the same, and give scrappers teh same kind of team proximity percentage increase stalkers got.

That still bugs me that they gave the scrapper inherent to stalkers on TOP of their guaranteed critical from hide, and even made it so the stalker version works better.

That's like giving corruptors defiance on top of scourge, or vice versa with blasters.

It's odd really.

My blaster that everyone used to laugh at is now one of the current FOTMs. I've PvPed with a Sonic/Devices since I8 and got a lot of lols in zones. Now I see people asking for advice on PvP builds for them. I find it pretty funny.

I have a claws/regen that used to do alright, now he survives about as well as he used to, but can't kill squat.

BS/DA that used to fare surprisingly well. Now the only kills he gets are when I catch a squishy napping and OGloom actually hits before someone shuts it off. The rez is nice now though

I have a Spines/Fire that I'm going to build a PvP AoE build to throw at the gank squads in RV. Wait til they all swarm me and hit BU, FE, Spine Burst, Impale whoever I have targeted and then RotP (because I'll probably be dead by then, if not sooner )

That's about all I ever actively PvPed with, so the nerfs didn't really hit me that hard. I have all but stopped PvPing anyway, more due to people's behavior in zones recently than any particular changes that affected me.

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The +def provided by Cloaking Device is negligible

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Ah, much like the heal provided by Life Drain then.

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I will be VERY surprised if a blaster version of Dark Blast is allowed to keep the self heal.

Devices is and always will be an anomaly in blaster sets. It gives up a lot of the things that some or most people consider to be staples of blasters for utility powers.

If Dark Blast is proliferated unchanged then Dark/Mental would quickly become one of the most survivable blaster combinations possible. Very possibly even to the point of being overpowered.

Since it doesn't exist I can't make any guesses as to the ability of that combo. But it would have anemic ST damage and very respectable AoE with TT, Nightfall, and Psychic Scream. A self heal AND a regen/recovery boost that is potentially perma. The to-hit debuffs would add quite a bit to any defense you can cobble together out of set bonuses and power choices.

With some of the blaster build wizards on the forums here I expect it wouldn't be long before someone comes up with a nearly unkillable build.

So, the stated reasons are why I think it unlikely that blasters will get Life Drain in a Dark Blast port. They may even lose Tenebrous Tentacles ( I hope not though) or Dark Pit (don't really care about that one)