Dante

I'm going to wade in here to answer the title of this thread and in my opinion: nothing.

Sonic is a decent set which while it might not appeal to the min/maxers out there, is a wonderfully safe effective set that I still play many moons after my Sonic/En hit 50. To counter some of the negative aspects that have been mentioned here (which I do agree with but don't necessarily see as negative) I'll list some of the greatest points about Sonic.

1) It's safe. It has three soft control tools in Shockwave, Siren's Song and Screech. Now the first two of these I would not recommend using in a team but all of them are great solo. Screech is excellent for targetting problem mobs (mostly lieutenants who will mezz but chaps like Sky Raider Engineers, Rikti Comms Officers and others) and taking them out of the fight early. Screech has great duration compared to other mezzes and is wildly effective throughout the game.

2) It's secondary effect allows you to do more damage and as long as you have some good recharge, you can stack the effect several times over. Sure, the debuffs are not as strong as on a Defender but they help. Especially on a team, being able to add a small debuff to a spawn with Howl is a nice help to the team. Howl, bear in mind, is a pretty wide cone too.

3) Sonic is also nicely light on the endurance. I think The Amber Banshee is the only Blaster I've run up to Stamina without gasping for endurance every few fights. These days I have to be seriously Speed Boosted up the wazoo to come even close to draining my endurance bar.

4) Shout is wickedly powerful. Sure its animation time isn't great but when it hits, it hits hard. As I tend to have fired off Scream and Shriek before hitting Shout, it gets the benefit of the -res debuffs and can hit like a Mac truck.

As for the perceived problems, they've never been an issue for me. The range has always been good and as for the origin of the blasts, I think it's more natural for sonic attacks to come from the mouth than from someone's hands surely? In comparison to other Blasters, you may feel slightly underpowered but the set has some excellent components to it that make this less of an issue. For solo powerset, I can't think of one that's safer save perhaps Ice for its holds. On a team, it makes an excellent single target Blaster, especially if you take out problem mobs with Screech and apply Howl to the spawn. You can also consider targetting through a melee AT as well so that their attacks get the benefit of your -Res.

Sonic is not the most powerful set but it is safe and it is fun. If you have a concept that fits it, don't let the percieved problems put you off. It's a solid set, it's just better suited to Defenders and Corruptors but that doesn't mean it's gimped in the slightest. It's just a bit different.

One thing I will say is, if you are bothered by the sounds, give up now. They've never bothered me at all but if they bug you now, they might do after a while.

I've had the same problem this evening. I tried resetting the connection, flushing my DNS, nothing...

In the end, I had to restart the whole computer.

*Starts planning a new alt - The Phlegm Master*

Played through this during the afternoon. I liked the set up, the characters and the humour.

I wasn't too keen on running around the third mission five times but then I dislike that map on the best of days.

Unfortunately, I think the final mission is bugged and the Guardian never spawned. A shame as I would have liked to see how it ended.

Thanks everyone, much appreciated insights. I guess the impression I'm getting is that Stalkers are single target specialists and don't fare as well against large groups. Given that the Scrapper I'm considering instead is MA/Shield, I guess I couldn't get more opposite.

Ninjitsu still looks appealing, I've never been able to muster the time to try Super Reflexes properly. I think it's because there's nothing really unique to the set these days, it's just Defence, more Defence and a little bit more Defence with a cherry on top. But I can't deny I've seen some impressive things done by those with it.

Thanks for your help.

*Coughs from the dust rising from the grave of this thread*

COUGH!!!

Cough!!

Wheeeeezze!!!

The UK office was looking into this just before it got nuked from on high by NC central. I believe that they'd even found someone who could produce the sculptures too I think.

Shame, I would have liked to have seen what they came up with.

I only have one Tank, my Stone/SS and when I’m in a Tanking mood, he rocks (no pun intended). For me, it comes down to one thing: pulling other people’s fat out of the fire. You see, I can rescue innumerable amounts of NPCs on any of my heroes but nothing gives me the same rush as coming to the rescue of my friends. I know that on my team I am the one who is the most survivable, who will be the last one standing and the one who takes the damage so they don’t have to. I’m the one that runs in and gets the villains to hit me rather than my squishy mates.

Given that my general playstyle tends to lean more towards squishy characters, it feels great to stand in the middle of a baying mob and know that they simply can’t hurt me. And then I hit Footstomp and watch them all fall over.

To illustrate, my favourite Tanking moment came ironically from when I was playing my Warshade and was what inspired me to create a Tank. There I was, blasting away in Nova form when I notice that an incoming ambush has picked our poor little FF Defender to target. The team, too concerned with what was going on up front hadn’t noticed. So I shifted into Dwarf mode and teleported into the middle of the ambush, smashing and taunting so that they left her alone. By now, the team has clocked what’s going on and come in to destroy the rest of the mob. Ambush dealt with, we go on our way but not before the Defender had sent me a tell saying thanks. I felt awesome that day, and that’s when I decided to roll a Tank.


(I should add, that only a few minutes after that, we came across a Void Boss who almost one shotted me. But before he could get another blast in, the same Bubbler flew in and Force Bolted the Void across the room before using Aid Other on me. It’s still up there as one of my favourite moments in CoX. )

Hi folks, long time player, first time Stalker here and I’d appreciate some guidance. Despite being here for almost 5 years, I’ve never mastered the Stalker AT so I’ll admit ignorance to a lot of how they play and what they contribute to a team.

Basically, I have been planning on a character to explore Going Rogue content and although I thought I’d settled on a Blaster, however, a couple of kung fu movies later and suddenly I'm considering a martial arts master, a character type I’ve never done before.

Now here’s the thing. I’ve played plenty of Scrappers before but never a Stalker and the impression I’ve always got was that Stalkers could hit a single target very hard and then scrap it out a little bit before having to run and hide again. Whereas by contrast I’ve watched a friend’s Dark/Regen Scrapper solo the entire final room of Gaussian’s RWZ arc. (Myself and the rest of the team were faceplanted at the time, it was quite epic to watch.)

So I guess what I’m wondering is: Are Stalkers capable of the same kind of insane feats such as these? Or are they the exclusive domain of insane Scrappers? Can I hang around and take on a few mobs or are Stalkers still limited to taking a few hard targets down and then fleeing before being swamped?

For information, the Stalker I have in mind will be MA/Nin. Thanks for your time.

English is my native tongue but I can pass in French and at least can say 'Hello' 'Goodbye' 'Thank you' and the favourite English word 'Sorry' in Arabic and Greek. Although I do like to find out what the native version of 'Cheers' is in every country I visit.

This one maybe?



All from here:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Weapon...ation#War_Mace

Nice poster. I'll see what I can do to attend.

The chances of us seeing anything on this matter before Going Rogue I measure as next to nothing. Until that baby hits, I reckon all efforts are being poured into making sure GR is a success. In the meantime, we’re on our own. Which means making our own teams, our own events, as suggested in the ‘When GR hits…’ thread.

As for action, I reckon as customers we’ve got three choices:

1) Quit the game altogether

2) Keep playing and put up with it

3) Sigh with resignation, say goodbye to the time, money and love we’ve invested in our EU characters and go and buy up NA accounts.

None of the above appeal. And so I have decided to go with the fourth option: Keep Vocal.

One of the great things about this game/community, is that we have access to the Devs through these forums. In my experience of MMOs, that’s fairly unique. And so I reckon we need to keep talking about this issue, keep it present in people’s minds. As I’ve said before, I reckon any radical decisions regarding the future of the EU servers will be made by someone far away from the Developers and these forums. But by keeping the issue out there, it gets noticed. Not just by us, but by the community, by the Devs, by anyone that’s passing. We might not get many redname posts, especially now due to GR but I do believe they read these forums at the very least.

We may end up sounding like a broken record after a while but I don’t think that should stop us from highlighting key differences between the NA and EU experience especially when it contributes to the gap between us and our cousins. Let’s remain polite, constructive but persistent and unafraid to shout out when something stinks.

I made this suggestion ages ago:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...hlight=Costume