ClawsandEffect

I think they are anticipating a lot of players to transfer at least one level 50 character to the server with the free transfers we're getting for being VIPs.

I won't be, but I WILL be recreating my main as a Claws/Energy Aura scrapper.

If your primary is Sonic or Fire you can take AVs. Actually with those two sets it doesn't matter much what your secondary is. Their single target damage is very good.

6 of one, half dozen of the other.

You'd probably end up having to swap the whole set, instead of cherry picking powers. That would mean brutes would have to lose Gloom (another DoT power).....I would not suggest being the one to tell the brutes that. The resulting SMASH would be a terrible thing to behold.

I would also not like to tell the Regen scrappers they don't get to have Shadow Meld anymore.

I said nothing in Regen needs 6 slots. I would at least 5 slot all those powers, and 6 slot many of them.

I've seen exactly one in the 6 years I've been playing. As such, I have very little idea how you would develop a playstyle to make it work. On the surface there is very little synergy between the sets, but that's never stopped people from making some awesome builds.

Maybe someone will post that has played the combo. Or perhaps you could be the one who figures out an effective way to build and play one.

Good call, I'd forgotten about this.

That was my biggest hurdle to overcome in getting my BS/DA to the point of soloing AVs. I've had the damage output and survivability for a couple years now, I just couldn't keep going long enough to drop them. That changed with Cardiac Alpha.

I can do it without the Alpha, but not without inspirations. I need to keep a few blues handy to get me through running low when Conserve Power is down.

I've posted it a few times around here. It hasn't changed much.

I'll try to track it down when I get home from work.

It's not an uber build. It has perma DP, runs a chain of Follow Up-Slash-Focus-Strike, has 32.5% S/L defense, and just over 700% passive regen. It can also chain Follow Up-Spin-Eviscerate gapless if you want an AoE chain.

No purples, no PvP IOs (I could probably softcap S/L if I wanted to acquire the Glad Armor, but I refuse to go to that much effort on a single character)

I just don't post it often because there are usually better builds posted in response to Claws/Regen. But, at the end of the day, *I'M* happy with it, and that's all I really care about.

T Immortalus's post was particularly amusing.

As I recall, he didn't have much to say after it was pointed out that even though you bought a cell phone, you still have to pay your bill if you want to use it.

Strange. Your proposed badge is the exact title of an Incubus album.

It's a VIDEO GAME.

The farmer is losing nothing, because the stuff he is "losing" was never real in the first place.

When that farmer is having trouble paying his bills at home because he is losing some fictional currency in a made up world, maybe THEN I'll feel sorry fro him. As it stands, it's only a video game, so the completely made up currency that is only usable in a fictional internet based world means precisely squat.

Really, the idea that you need to be compensated for doing something in a video game is completely ludicrous. I understand the value of influence better than you do, it seems. It has ZERO value. When you log out of the game you have earned nothing of any use to you. When I can make my mortgage payment in influence, maybe then I'll concede it has some value.

To the OP: Yeah, that's pretty much Freedom's Atlas Park, and has been since i14. They REALLY need to remove the AE building from Atlas. I seriously wonder how many new players have logged into Atlas Park, got sucked into an AE farm, and never saw anything else in the game because they were completely convinced that AE was the whole freaking game until they got bored and left.

It's entirely possible.

There's a guy on Pinnacle that swears Duff McKagen from Guns and Roses and Velvet Revolver is in his VG.

MMOs seem like they'd be the perfect outlet for celebrities. They can interact with regular people without getting mobbed or otherwise annoyed because no one knows who they really are.

If you've played the game for any significant length of time and regularly PuG, chances are you've played with someone at least semi-famous.

It's a two part question, so I'll give you a two part answer.

The first one, why the restrictions, is to prevent players from creating extremely overpowered combinations and/or so gimped they're unplayable combinations.

Complete freedom of choice was allowed in the very first Alpha version of the game, and one guy created a character who was invulnerable and could fly. That was ALL he could do, he had zero ability to actually defeat anything. That particular character would be completely unplayable.

On the other side of it, you'd have tankmages. Characters with nearly impenetrable defenses and overwhelming offensive capability. Characters with the defenses of a tank and the damage output of a blaster would be overpowered in this game by quite a bit.

Your second question, why we can't change our powersets when we respec is related, but different.

Powersets are balanced against other ATs and against other powersets in the same AT.

Lets look at two Tanker primaries; Stone Armor and Willpower. Stone Armor gets a power at level 32 that will allow it to be nearly invincible to all damage types for as long as it can keep that toggle active (pretty much indefinitely). It has drawbacks, but it is almost imnpossible to kill a Stone tank in Granite if an experienced player is controlling it. The price the set as a whole pays for that survivability is that it is relatively weak before getting that power.

On the other side, you have Willpower. Willpower is an easy set to level up as. It doesn't lose any survivability at high levels, but it still isn't going to touch Granite Armor levels of survivability.

If you could change powersets in a respec, you could level as a Willpower tank and switch to Stone at some point after Granite Armor is available. You have juts gotten to the good part of the most survivable set without having to play that set through the levels where it is weak. Being able to do that would destroy the balance between the sets, and Stone Armor would be considered extremely overpowered because you could switch to it when it gets good and ignore the squishier early levels.

There are sets in every AT that follow the same pattern. Radiation Emission and Kinetics as used by a controller would be another good example. Kinetics gets it's key power at level 38, while Radiation gets it's good powers mostly before level 20. If you could level as a Plant/Rad controller (which gets it's good powers early) and switch to a Fire/Kin after level 38, you've skipped the levels in which Fire/Kin isn't particularly great.

It's all about balance between the power sets. The sets that get good later in the game aren't that good in the beginning of the game. In that way it is fair for the sets that peak early and never get much better.

Heh, I knew a guy who was going to insult someone by writing something in the snow covering their car.

Next morning: "What's a 'fage'?"

It was actually pretty funny.

I was going to mention this.

If you have the Event channel turned on it tells you exactly when a Giant Monster or similar spawns. It tells you about GMs, the Steel Canyon fires, Troll raves, and the Ghost Ship spawning. It also tells you about zombie and Rikti invasions.

I read the OP and thought "Doesn't this already exist in the chat window?"

Someone's an Incubus fan......

I could probably come up with something using the original definition of "something strange or unusual."

But it will probably still offend someone, because no one remembers what it used to mean.

By the way, the version of a word mentioned earlier that means "a piece of wood" only has one G in it. 1 G = A piece of wood, 2 Gs = an offensive slur. Spelling is important, and both of them are censored because a lot of people are poor spellers. (I can tell that 2 Gs were used because the censored word had 6 letters)

Right, because not having money to spend on a video game automatically means the person in question is unemployed.

Sorry, chief, but buying formula, diapers and food for my 11 month old son trumps ANY video game I could ever play. This game is the last luxury I've allowed myself in the midst of working 2 jobs and taking college courses, and it's the next thing to go if I get hit with another money crunch.

Did it occur to you that some people have to pay bills that total more than they make? And "live within your means" is a cop out response to that. 6 months or a year ago those people WERE living within their means and lost their job, leading to them having to accept a lower paying one. When "live within your means" equals "lose everything you've worked for for years" it's not a very fair thing to tell someone.

Some people genuinely CAN'T afford to spend $2 a month on a video game. Because other things they could spend that $2 a month on are more important than escapism.

That is my guess as well.

My build will translate to a brute completely intact, and will actually be BETTER on endurance consumption, because brutes get Superior Conditioning and scrappers don't.

Extra bonus: With fury adding to it's damage, spamming Parry to stay softcapped won't hurt my DPS as much as it does on a scrapper.

It is a great power. So great that Energy Aura is getting a clone of it in i21.

At the moment, I'm leaning toward Energy Aura. Except I'm rolling it as a scrapper because that's the only way I can make a Spines/Energy and have Quills. If brutes ever get Spines it will be a no-brainer.

I'll get back to you on this one. When brutes get Broadsword I'm recreating my BS/DA scrapper as a brute (I'm not deleting the original, just making a new one)

I have a feeling if I recreate my exact build (positional soft-capped) the brute will prove superior. Dark Armor brutes get a taunt aura in Death Shroud, so I can skip OGloom and CoF and keep everything on me, that should help my AoE damage output (one of my scrapper's weak points)

MY passive regen is good enough to see me through most encounters, but I'm an oddball among /Regen players, I actually slot for lots of passive regen (my main has just over 700% with just Integration running).

Most experienced regen players would probably tell you no, but that's because they are operating on the theory that adding regen to a set that already has lots of it is a waste of slots. Nothing wrong with that theory, I just disagree with it.

Between my moderate amount of defense and my high passive regen, I can get through most fights without having to hit a click heal, which lets me save them for when I REALLY need them.