DrMike2000

Yeah, I'd love to see this too.

I think you may have outlined the one potential barrier to a straight proliferation there though. Trip Mine is a hefty chunk of AoE damage at the cost of long setup time and associated risk.

For an AT that can temporarily stun or hold whole crowds, and gains this ability at the expense of low damage, especially AoE damage, Trip Mine may just be a bit too much.

Never mind Gravity Controllers and Wormhole - Flashfire the crowd and lay Fire Cages so they dont fly everywhere. Walk in amongst the stunned masses and toe bomb them, then Fire Cage and Toe bomb again. Its too good to be true

The beauty of superspeed (in the absence of any other powers) is that you have to keep moving - into melee to hit the target and then out again to avoid the retaliation.

Currently the best way to get this vibe is to play a Kinetics Defender with the Sands of Mu power. From level 6 onwards you get unsupressed speed in combat from Siphon Speed and can run rings round the opposition as they switch between ranged and melee AI. Kite past them and deliver the multiple superfast blows from what appears to be 20 feet away. I had a blast doing this on my speedster.

The sad thing is that Kinetics other powers encourage you to stand still and fight toe-to-toe - Transfusion, Transference and Fulcrum Shift are all enemy based.


From my experience with Kinetics, I reckon CoH can support a melee speedster where you do actually move around the battlefield, rather than a series of ranged attacks where "you" zip in and out (really a power effect afterimage) without your character (or their camera) moving. That wouldn't feel as fast.

Yeah, Wormhole and theStupefy proc are very bad together. I found that out the hard way early on in I9.

The Stupefy Proc in genral isn't all bad though. It knocks back bosses where most attacks its placed in wouldn't stun them straight away. Its main purpose is to look cool though. I've had some good mileage out of it.

I love Sands of Mu, and have used it as part of my attack chain up to 50 on various Controllers and Defenders. I got by with global accuracy bonuses, typically around +40% on Defenders (3 Thunderstrikes, 2 Positrons) and a bit less on Controllers.

I've used it on most tanks as an extra attack, plus to work through the Rage crash on Ss-ers.

In addition to all the benefits already listed, it does half Negative damage, which is great against Rikti.


I guess I wouldn't use it much on a weapons Scrapper, due to the ptoprotionally lower damage and redraw, or on a Blaster, where the long root matters more and your entire try is full of attacks by 20.

Yeah, a Controller or Dom single target hold is perma on a single target. But increasing the hold duration of a ST hold allows you to neutralise more enemies at once. People already slot individual powers for hold duration, so why not set bonuses?

The standard slotting advice for ST holds on the Controller boards has usually been 2 Acc, 2 Rech, 2 Hold, maybe swapping the Holds for Dam if you solo a lot.

My first 50, an Elec/Elec Blaster made it to 50 using slotted Tesla Cage, which allowed me to hold higher level bosses quickly and permanently.

And you're right, Bill, there are quite a few set bonuses besides the mez ones that could do with an overhaul.

I agree with Crim.

The current Mez duration (and mez duration reduction) bonuses are small enough to be meaningless. Currently there is no point in building for extra mez duration.

Boosting the numbers and merging the different types would give people another aim for IO builds. Currently, pretty much any Controller (and many other characters) just build for global recharge, and thats it. Some diversity would be very cool.

I like the idea behind the Ninja set - fragile disposable pets that can do very high melee damage, thus requiring a lot of attention.

Smoke Flash kind of puts a damper on this though with its insane 30 base end cost. If it was scheaper it could be slotted more for Recharge and spammed more heavily across the multiple pets. this would still require a lot of player attention - move to melee and flash, but at least it wouldn't bottom out your end bar doing this.

The damage type doesn't really matter to me.

If there was an alternate animation for Fire Sword Circle that didn't involve a sword (say a Fiery footstomp) and it did some lethal damage instead of pure fire despite not having anything sharp in its animation, so what?
Robots for example may seem to be a bit more fireproof than they should be if you're scrutinising your combat log, but you're still heating them up and making them fall over.

Its preferable and far less immersion breaking to what we currently have. The icon will still show "Fire Sword Circle" when you mouse over it, it will still do lethal damage, but at least you wont be materialising a giant flaming sword out of thin air every time you use it.

Yep. Here's the entries for Gravity Control's Gravity Distortion from Red Tomax's site as an example:
(http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power)

+17.88s Held (mag 3) PvE only
+26.82s Held (mag 3) PvE only, in Domination

Yep, its bothered me since day one too.

It came up a lot in the recent thread where Castle asked which powers we'd like to have alternate animations for, so here's hoping we get exactly that sometime soon.

Blessing of the Zephyr was pretty much a must-have for almost every squishy I ever made - since it provided KB protection and good defence to two positions in 3 slots. Thats 3 big bonuses for 3 slots.

Kinetic Combat is one big bonus for 4 slots. I hardly ever use it.

And I think the situation with defence is fine as it is.

Anyone can build up big numbers if they spend through the nose for it. These builds are usually expensive, and only come together in high levels, and thus provide a kind of end-game goal for a lot of characters.

IO Defence builds on a Blaster or anyone else with no native defence usually cover a low range of attacks heavily or a few types to a lesser degree.

Defence sets are at a big advantage due to the Defence debuff resistance they pack. Def debufs are common enough to make this matter. And defence sets are typically well protected (eg 1 luck pill = god mode) by the mid 20s.

Let the floodgates open

Focus and Shockwave. I have no idea how my claws character can knock people over from 40 feet away using his claws. They're great powers, but why this set gets ranged attacks is beyond me. This bugged me enough to start a thread on it once.

Kinetics - I still don't know what this powerset is meant to represent. Its partly power absorption (Siphons and Fulcrum Shift), partly superspeed (the only way to get unsupressed speed in combat), allows you to increase ally's density and heal them?
Transfusion's enemy-based AoE heal that can miss is probably the most mysterious. No idea what's going on when I use that.

Radiation Emission is kind of similar. Very useful set, but I've never explained it as a character using radioactivity to do all that. Reality altering like the Scarlet Witch of Mad Jim Jaspers maybe, but not radiation. This set also fits Element Lad style transmutation quite nicely if paired with Ice or Earth control.

I also agree that Sonic Resonance is a wierd set if you try to explain it as sound-based. "Solid sound" like Klaw from Marvel comics never really made sense much. Its a good set for matter manipulation of some kind like Firestorm from the JLA maybe.

Drain Psyche is a bit odd for a set that is almost all telepathy, but I guess the +Regen can be thought of as mentally easing pain rather than bullet holes closing up like Wolverine.

On a similar note, the defence powers that increase with enemies around you. Why do Invulnerable characters get more accurate? And why does Willpower make you heal more quickly? They're great game mechanics though, and your character doesn't have to be aware of it in a "Ha! These enemies are easing my wounds!" or "Finally! I can hit that Rikti Drone thanks to the other 9 guys piling on me!" way.

When I stop and think about this, I always wonder what's the difference between repeatedly using a power on the enemy to make them fall over and repeatedly uisng a power on teammates to make them perform better?

There definitely is a difference. I've enjoyed playing buffers, and tried to keep everyone SB'd on my Kineticists, but it was often quite frustrating.

I think the worse thing is that players have really good AI for getting out of range or round the corner, especially with a movement buff. Buffing is like fighting Circle of Thorns mages times a hundred, they run away constantly when you're trying to hit them.

The binds I used were just the simple:

/bind numpad1 teamselect 1
/bind numpad2 teamselect 2
/bind numpad3 teamselect 3
/bind numpad4 teamselect 4
etc.

and then had Speed Boost and ID in 9 and 0 on my tray. With SB, I wouldn't sweat it if you miss someone. Let them know ahead its OK to say "SB plz" once, after all it saves you the trouble of keeping track of who you've missed because they just zipped round the corner.

Oh yeah, and fights are the best time, not in between. Everyone tends to bunch together and stand still in a fight.

I often build for defence, but decided not to on my Fire/Energy/Fire Blaster, and I often use Rise of the Phoenix as part of her attack chain at level 50.

I have never regretted this decision - its fun to play a character for whom defeat is turned to your advantage.
(I would slot for damage and forego the 10% Rech from Absolute Amazement though. Even just 3 Dam/Mez Hami's would be nice in RotP.)

I'd go for the recharge option here.

Thanks, Pretender.

Yeah, It was the second travel power post in that week, but quite a different take from your archetypes idea, Rachel.

I think there isn't really a lot to comment on in my post other than like/dislike.
My post is long and plain, and deliberately free of novel/discussion-worthy powers in order to keep it concept neutral. There's pretty much one new mechanic in there - the charge power, and thats fairly straightforwards.

Beyond that its pretty much four flavours of "You move around quick and in doing so are hard to hit" spelled out in detail.

Nice work. That's a very elegant solution.

I'd ditch that Entropic Chaos Heal proc. It takes 200 hits to heal you fully on average. Unless you're really seeing results, I'd put another damage or two in there. 2 recharges is overkill, and hurting your damage per endurance.

I'd six-slot both your single targets with the king of single target sets - Thunderstirke. Cheap, +Recovery, + Acc, +Ranged and E/N Defence, and great values for the actual power.

TT:Manouvers needs 1 end, 3 defence max, boosting it from 10% Def to 16% defence. I'd take the slots out of TT:Leadership to do this. Look to giving this a Red Fortune set later on - +Recharge and more +Ranged Def.

Give Heavy Burst 3 damage instead of the +Range slot.

Maybe get the Steadfast unique +Res/+Def into Bane Armour? Thats an extra 3% Defence there to stack with everything else. If you can afford it that is.

In general for any build, all attacks should get 3 damage or equivalent, or you'll do less damage and take more end to defeat the same enemy groups.

I've never been a huge fan of true nukes - I always felt they were a bit underwhelming considering the penalty of 20-30 seconds downtime afterwards. I much prefer the half-nukes like Full Auto.

I did enjoy my first Blaster to hit level 32 (Elec/Elec) and spent a certain amount of time trawling Brickstown and Creys Folly for groups of orange minions that I could take out ten at a time with Aim/Build Up/Thunderous Blast. But, one lieutenant in the group could spoil that experience since they'd be left at half health with me with no endurance to finish them off. (This was before insp combining, so I wouldn't alwyas have a blue pill)

Since then though, I've only used nukes for special occasions, maybe once per week on characters I play every day. I find the frequency of the right situations coming up (swarmed by minions, but not about to die before it goes off, and no -one left to take me out post-nuke) are just too low in mission gameplay.

So I'd be quite happy if they introduced an alternative Tier 9 pseudo-nuke for some blast sets (as in choose the nuke or pseudo-nuke), but its not a high priority

The hero-side late game is littered with enemies that mez, do psi damage and drain endurance.
Both sets provide good protection against all these effects, always have done and still do.

There are more sets that don't have these holes these days (Dark Armor tanks & Electric Armor cover both, Willpower with Psi Resist and Defence) and also newer support sets that are less one-sided like Cold Domination. This has lead to these two sets being devalued a tiny little bit, more on paper than in game.

But a single well-played Empath or Force Fielder can still completely transform a team.

I dunno.

The current system we have has grown organically from dubious origins, but it does work.
When I level a character I look forwards to level 12 and level 22 as sudden jumps in power. If I'm impatient, I upgrade to level 10's or 20's at 7 and 17, and maybe indulge myself with some Yin-O's here and there in the teens.

The capabilities of enemies seems to match this curve, partly due to their abilities (eg relative lack of debuffs and mezzes at low levels), partly due to the sliding scales for damage scalars and base accuracy that have been put in place.

Thats a lot of variables, and a lot of boat to rock, or jelly to wobble, or whatever metaphor you want to use, and I'm not sure what for?

The big question is how much of a barrier is this to new players? I don't really know since I'm not a new player in the post-I9 world. Before the market, my experience was bad - reach level 22 and struggle to afford my SO's, I think I even struggled to keep myself in DO's. With all the extra stuff that drops, even vendoring it should solve these problems.

I certainly didn't mind the lower values on enhancements on my first trips through the first 20 levels.