DrMike2000

Been thinking a bit more about this, and brought me to Diablo II, oddly enough.

The levelling up process there heavily revolved around what I termed "Fear of Regret". You could spend your points now on Fire Bolt and enjoy the power right now, but you'd regret it once Fire Ball (or whatever) came along at level 12, and you'd wish you'd saved your points up for that instead.

CoX is refreshingly free of this in its main levelling process. If you invest in a Tier 1 skill, you won't regret it because you'll be using it through your entire career. Investments rarely go obsolete like that, and there are always respecs if they do.

This strikes me as much better - a game should be enjoyable now, rather than encouraging scrimping and saving for a future that's many hours of playtime away. Long term goals are vbital to this type of game, but shouldn't diminish what you can have now.

So I guess you have identified a little bit of "Fear or Regret" in the CoX mechanics, Fusion. Thankfully its a mild one, and can be tempered completely by having influence, which is freely available to all players.

I always start collecting sets at level 27.

Take Thunderstrike in ranged blasts for a Defender or Blaster.

Slotted with level 30s its capped damage and about 57% end redux, acc and recharge.
Slotted with level 50s its capped damage and about 70% end redux, acc and recharge.

The difference is negligible - I'd defy you to notice it in game without looking at the numbers. I have capped damage, 95% chance to hit most enemies I fight, a smooth attack chain and no endurance problems with 30's or 50's.

The big difference though is having the global bonuses and frankenslotting goodness from level 27 to level 50, well over half my career.

I mainly play levelling characters rather than 50s though, so that skews my decision. If I really loved a character and wnated to play them a lot at 50, I'd probably buy new Thunderstrikes for them, but 5-10 million is also peanuts to me now.

The same applies to many sets, Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds etc.
Some sets do benefit from slotting 50 IOs, eg Mako's Bite doesn't get capped damage until you use really high end enhancements.

If you're looking for powersets that don't leave you repeating the same actions over and over again, there are a few support sets that work a bit like that.

Storm Summoning
Freezing Rain, Lightning Storm and Tornado are not up often enough to use all three on each spawn.
Gale is situational but great when you can use it.
Its flashy, and dynamic, and has a lot of knockback to rein in. Used right, this is a blessing to you and your team.
Pair it with either a Blast set on a Defender or Corrupter, or a control set. Grav/Storm is popular, and Gravity Control also has a lot of situational powers like Wormhole, a AoE stun that teleports the victims (say into yout Freezing rain or Lightning Storm)

Traps
Another toolbag of powers that aren't up every fight. You've got Triage Beacon giving +Regen, Acid Mortar drawing aggro and lowering def and res, and Poison Gas Trap, and AoE hold patch.
On a rarer occasion, trip mines solve the problem. Lay down a field of them and draw the nemey in for a massive opening punch.
I enjoyed AR/Traps on a Corrupter.

Trick Arrows
Another toolbag set. Doesn't have enough self protection for my liking, and blooms late. Works better on Controllers from what I hear.


I'd try a Storm Defender or Controller.

Gravity/Storm on a Controller, maybe Plant/Storm for an earlier blooming set.
Storm/Sonic on a Defender, or whatever other primary takes your fancy.

A Dual Pistols/Traps defender would be fun too. Go Defender on that one, they get the best use of DP's debuffs and better values for Traps.

Cold Domination may also be worth looking at? I havent played it very far myself, but its a lot like Storm in many ways, only more team oriented.

I don't think you need Tough on your Trio.
The APP shields will be fine.

I've got a 50 Sonic/Energy Defender and a Pain/Energy duo in the 30's, and both work really quite well.

Neither Sonic or Pain give you a whole heap of personal survivability, so the knockback helps a lot when there's a Freak tank bearing down on you.

Sonic is very low maintenenace, giving you the time required to use Energy Blasts well. The only downside is that you have to move around a lot to do so, and some temamates may prefer you to stay still so they can shelter in your Dispersion bubble. It also allows you to keep enemies in Liquefy if they run out.

I'd really recommend Sonic/Energy. Its not a fantastic solo-er, but its passable for a Sonic, and it works well on teams if you know what you're doing.

I find FF/Energy overkill on both knockback and safety in general.

To look at it from another angle...

I've always defended the idea that some sets are better solo-ers than others. I believe in the perfect CoX I should be able to make an informed choice to pick a character who solos terribly but really shines on teams.

What could the four poorest solo sets to make them really shine on teams?

Thermal and Sonic need Psi Resistance.
Its the number one hole in armour sets - SR/Fire/Ice/Invulnerability and Stone all have a weakness to it, and its kind of embarassing to turn up to a fight against Carnies or the Clockwork King and be unable to help there. (And Force Fields gets Psi Defence in Dispersion Bubble.)
I'd suggest putting it in Clarity, and Sonic Dispersion. Maybe in Thaw for Thermal, or just in Plasma Shield since a Therm is having to apply two sets of shields already.

Thermal and Sonic need end tools (the other post-40 problem).
Its embarassing to watch everyone's end plummet fighting Carnies (to say nothing of your own issues as a Sonic). Any of the resistance shields could get some End Drain resistance like Insulation Shield gets. Forge could get some +Recovery to help out whoever's struggling the most. It really does seem a bit sub-par to me as it is, this would help a lot. Maybe even a little +Recharge to turn it into the "offensive Fortitude" it should be.

Pain needs something...
DeathBringer's swapping of the +100% Recharge from AB for +50% damage is poor. That's two little red pills, costing 100 inf I believe? Its 25% net damage output, less for Brutes. Make it +100% already (like I said for thaw earlier)
Give Enforced Morale a flat +25% Recharge boost, that doesn't stack from the same user. Whoever gave it a stackable 5% up to 25% knows the meaning of the word Pain, alright. Give it the fast cast of 1s and it would be worth keeping up on a team, and Pain has no other "buff-bot" duties at present.
This could get nasty on superteams, of course...

Empathy
I really don't know, despite my main being an Empath. A bit more +Damage on Fortitude? Maybe the ability to AB two allies with some decent recharge? (eg base 200 sec cooldown)
I do like the fact you play favourites with Empathy buffs, trying to work within that is tricky.

Let's keep Sonic Blast and Sonic Resonance separate, since they aren't in any way linked in the game mechanics.

Sonic Blast is hands down the best Blast set for Defenders, capable of generating equivalent -Res to any primary on its own, without you having to spend one iota of endurance or animation time to do so.
I've always felt that some of Sonic Resonances problems may have been overlooked early on because it often got thematically paired with Sonic Blast, which made it feel better than it really is in testing.

To reply to one of Gilia's point, Sonic Resonance does potentially do more -Res than other sets, but it comes with caveats.

1) The peak values are for single targets. It's -60% to the boss, -30% to everyone else, compared to Trick Arrows -40% to several targets, or Storm/Cold's -35% from Freezing Rain/Sleet.

2) Both the -Res powers do absolutely nothing else. Some other -Res powers apply -Def too, or knockdown or damage or whatever. Sonic's don't - you're spending animation time and endurance to just get -Res.

3) The AoE -Res needs a teammate. This means solo you're stuck with just Sonic Siphon - a long animating attack that eats into your endurance and animation time, thus not always improving your DPE or DPS by applying the -Res like it should. If the -Res of Sonic Siphon lets you use one less attack to finish off an enemy, it wasn't worth using.

I played one to 50.
Its an odd combo in that you can keep pumping cones out all day with a bit of recharge, since you have Howl (10 seconds), Shockwave (8 seconds) and Psychic Scream (12 seconds).

I played mine almost entirely at range, using the cones as an attack chain with the odd single target thrown in for hard targets (extra damage plus Res debuffs).
The only time I'd risk melee was for Drain Psyche, and this risk could be mitigated with a pre-emptive Shockwave - knock them back and then run in for a quick drain.

Do get Sirens Song - its great damage mitigation if you ever solo, or if you and your team need a breather, say if an ambush pincer-moves you.

I'd highly recommend Shockwave. The knockback is good damage mitigation (its 100%), and its a fast recharging AoE that does 80% base AoE damage, which is not negligible at all. Sonic/MM requires a fair bit of positioning to get good cone angles, complement these skills with using KB correctly and you'll be much better off than if you pass up on Shockwave.

You can build up a bit of Ranged defence using Thunderstrike in Shout, Scream and Shriek, and maybe Stupefy in Screech. Combining this with Shockwave against melee opponents and Sirens Song should keep you reasonably safe for a Blaster.

Later on I supplemented this with the PFF/Aid Self combo for even more damage mitigation.

Cap your defences.
Hover, Double Manouvers and Fortitude, all slotted up, is 38% or so. A couple of Thunderstrikes will do wonders there. Razzle Dazzle in Screech for extra M/AoE, maybe Aegis in your epic armour for hefty AoE.
Oh yeah, and the Steadfast IO in your epic armour.
If you use Shockwave, melee defence becomes less of an issue. If not, Enfeebled Operation in an epic pool immobilise is a good buy for over 4% bonus.

Get KB protetcion, since Clear mind doesn't provide it.

If you're taking Hasten, slotting for Recharge is probably dubious. Sonic has quick recycling AoEs, so you'll already have an all AoE attack chain if you want it, and Hasten + AB + slotting should be enough for perma-Hasten and AB. You're maybe a little tiny bit short, so gathering up an extra 20% or so (eg Doctored Wounds in Regen Aura, AB, Healing Aura and Heal Other) wont hurt, and provides Frankenslotting bonuses over SOs anyway, ie almost maxes out Recharge and Healing or so in 5 slots.

Some good points there, Biospark. Support sets are always going to be the hardest to balance since they're the most diverse in effects

I agree with pretty much everything you say on Sonic Resonance there. Sonic should be the king of -Res effects, and currently it isn't. Sonic Repulsion does indeed come across as a failed experiment and nothing more, whereas Repel and Repulsion Field are actually quite useful.
Psi res in Clarity is a great idea. Having a hole to Psi that's shared with half the armour sets is a bit silly in my opinion.

I would also close the sleep hole on Dispersion Bubble and Sonic Dispersion. It makes little sense, and these sets give up a lot for mez protection. Its also incredibly dissappointing to get slept by Carnie Illlusionists (since Blind packs a little sleep there too)

I don't like your suggestion for Fortitude. In principle, I like the idea of Empathy playing differently - that its the set where you spoil a few favourites rather than dishing out the buffs to everyone. In practice, I agree that the syncopated buff cycle is a pain to play and requires too much memory of who was last, attention to your power bar for Fort coming up, and so on.
Limiting Fortitude to 3 to 5 people is cool, not being able to go into buff-mode and then blast-mode mentally is not.
If there was a way to fix it besides recharge, I'd be all for it, eg every 2 minutes you can Fort 3 people one after the other. But that's messing with the game mechanics too much I think.

Your ideas on Recovery Aura and Regen Aura are cool. Especially Recovery Aura - having too much end to eat and starving the other half of the time is plain annoying.
Regen Aura I'm less convinced though - having a team god-mode here can be useful since you can easily get into situations where you need that amount of Regen (unlike Recovery Aura, where you neevr need that much end). Being able to pick and choose when the team or just you) get that is maybe a good thing.

I've played Pain Dom a bit, and the aura-rocker power Soothing Aura, is actually fantastic as a no-animation time heal, both on teams and solo. Empathy could really use something like this, so thats an argument for adjusting the recharge/intensity of Regen Aura I guess.

Forge needs a better damage buff. +40% is less than a medium red pill. Its +20% net damage if you're slotted, ie less of a boost than Sonic Siphon. And its limited to a few team members. It could do with +80% at least.


One final suggestion - cut the end cost on ressurections. They're emergency powers. It sucks not being bale to use one at the right time because they cost half an end bar. Its not a big deal, but its one more reason why i tend to skip them.

If each character had a flag as to whether they'd been "super-Assassin'd", so that it could only happen once, I think this could really work.

Say you're fighting a +1 AV. If you have a Stalker on the team, they can in one shot remove 75% of its health. After that, the AV is flagged, and Assassin Strikes from the same Stalker or any others just do regular damage, even if the AV regens beyond the 25% health mark.

You can't make a superteam of Stalkers who'll be able to take down AVs together, but multiple Stalkers are still useful for softening up a group of AVs.You don't improve Stalker DPS this way, but you do give them awesome burst damage when it counts. This to me seems a fair trade for being sub-par at 95% of the PVE game content by having diminished AoE damage.

I've got a bunch of X-Men style characters who are mutants. (One of whom has the mutant gift to see into the future a few seconds, and is a Widow, and therefore forced to be Natural. Whatever. She's card-carrying X-gene positive.)

I've got a few non-powered heroes who are Natural.
My Amazon scrapper is natural, despite using high-tech Athenium weaponry.
I've got two super-powered Naturals, one was raised by energy beings (like a space-Tarzan) and has a variety of one-at-a-time powers they can induce in him, the other is a spontaneously generated Earth Elemental.

I've got a few Tech characters. A couple who wear special Impolex suits to give them superpowers. Three different future Amazon cop who uses high tech guns, devices and wings (Traps/AR and TA/A). A robot.

Everyone else is Science, its my catch-all origin.
Artificial humans created by the Life Star (a giant techno-moon).
Earth people given Life Star technology upgrades - usually more irradiation/chemicals than cybernetics, so it feels more Science than tech to me. (One has to keep drinking a serum daily, he might be tech. I can't remember.)
A 30th C mathematician with a special self-duplication equation.
A 1970's physicist who fell through time and space and became a photographic negative of himself.
Its all science.

I don't think I have any Magic characters currently.
I made one 30th C tradition chinese medicine Magic character who ended up getting deleted when I ran low on slots.
My first 50 was an Elec/Elec blaster made by my daughter originally, who chose the origin. I used to tease her that her character got her powers when she fell over and got her head stuck in a microwave, and we later decided that that was canon. But, HERO corps refused to believe this and classified her as "Magic".

I've found plenty of situations where knockback's better than Knockdown.

- Pushing an enemy back into the group
- Pushing an enemy back into a debuff zone
- Knocking over a KB resistant enemy
- Ranged enemy on top of a tall shipping crate, firing down from the edge. Knocking them back breaks line of sight and tends to make them come down to you.
- In general due to the longer duration that they're disabled, which is what Luminara is referring to, I believe.


I was referring earlier to Tornado, by the way. KB instead of KD means it doesn't automatically become a meat-mincer and perma-flopper every time its used.
I know mass immobilises on Controllers can help it do this, but they miss and the -KD lasts only 10 seconds, forcing you to spam a very expensive power for your damage (and lose the disabling effect of the knockback). They certainly did when I tried using Bonfire and Fire Cages - there was always some scatter.

I am agog at Water Spout, I never realised it did knock up before. Is it as good as it sounds?

Centurion, you realise you can transform a character for much less money right now?

The IO system offers a layered set of rewards.

Start off with Crushing Impacts or Thunderstrikes in all your attacks, this will cost the order of 20 million maybe? 50 million at most? Yellow sets.
Attacks you slot this way will be leaner and meaner than the SO equivalent, and you effectively get a few Super Reflex passive powers thrown in for free, either a rechrge boost or a Ranged defence boost along with some bonus accuracy. This difeerence is noticable in game.

Then progress to add sets like Positron's Blast, Mako's Bite, Touch of Death or Eradication. Orange sets. You'll pay maybe 20-50 million per power for these, and get better bonuses in your other powers and more set bonuses.

Then go onto the expensive stuff like Kinetic Combat, KB protection IOs, the Steadfast Unique, LotG recharge and you'll getting the big benefits like perma-ing some powers maybe or capping defence. You're talking 100 mill for some of these.

Finally there's the purple and PVP IOs. 2 billion for some.

If players could get this fourth tier of purple/PVP straight away, they'd be "Cool. Done that game. Whats next?". Easy come, easy go, off and play Champions or DCU instead.
As it is now, you do get rewarded for 3-6 months play if you go the IO route (yellow, maybe orange sets) and its a noticeable improvement, but there's still more to reach for.

THAT is what keeps people coming back to a game over a long time period. This is a subscription based game, so thats what benefits the devs, as well as the players. Its basic game design 101. Reward the player early, but keep offering new horizons to aspire to. Does that make sense?

Are you really saying if you could have the best build ever in 6 months you'd keep playing this game for years?

(I've been at this for over 4 years, and have purpled out exactly one character. Never slotted a PVP IO yet. Never did a LotG +Recharge till this last year. Now I've slotted maybe 10 of them across my characters? Did my first Miracle + Recovery's this week. I'm having fun.)

I'd be in favour of this.

Certain powers would have to be coded to not accept them, such as Repel/Repulsion Field, Whirlwind, Bonfire and Tornado, since they'd be overpowered if they did knockdown.

But giving people the option to use slots to turn KB into KD seems like a good idea for some other powers.

Yep, being able to customise animations to turn Energy Blast or Rad Blast into a raygun set would be awesome. (And much better than a set with some different contrived ingame effects)

Especially if you can choose pistol or rifle animations.

I wouldn't say no to a concussive energy bow either (Energy Blast with bow animations), come to think of it

I dunno...

I don't see what it allows you to do that you can't already do with Invulnerability, Willpower or Energy Aura and the existing armour costume pieces.
Some new armour pieces would be nice, for sure, but shouldn't be linked to any powerset.

If anything, your suggestion makes me question the existing Shield powerset, which ties a costume piece into a set of game mechanics in a kind of arbitrary way. I can't help but think a "No Shield" option on Shields would satisfy most of what you're asking for here, and you never actually use the shield in Shield Defence. It just sits on your arm.

Your numbers look about right for a tanker (31% Def when slotted, plus resistances), maybe a bit on the low side?

Adding the fear component to the power armour doesn't make thematic sense to me. Compared to a Hulk, Thing, undead zombie, or a guy on fire, a guy in a suit of power armour is not really any scarier than any other Tank out there.

I'd highly recommend a Defender for this combo.

Both powersets have significantly better debuffs for the Defender, both the -Res and +Res in the shields.

Cutting back on Recharge would compromise your surviivability because Eclipse is up less often.

Cutting back on damage compromises your surviviability because you get less SC fodder.

I'd try the Kinetic Dampener temp power and see if that gives you the edge you need, even if you keep it up only for the alpha from each group. Its 16% S/L Defence, enough to dull the damage between the first strike and your first feed with Stygian Circle. If it seems like a good start, you could maybe swap in a few Kinetic Combats to your melee attacks instead of Crushing Impacts, only a 5% recharge loss per set.

I too agree with Life Drain. Dark Blast suffers from having no Aim and no Tier 3 Blast. Giving Life Drain a bit more oomph would help nicely.

As for Knockback, I like it the way it is. I hate the "oopsy-daisy" knockdown animation compared to proper rag-dolling. I believe most players are more than capable of using KB strategically.

As a KB user and IO-slotter who uses all the slots I get for sweet sweet set bonuses, I would hate to have to waste slots on restoring KB to any of my powers.

PPD Ghost.

They pack that long duration ridiculously overpowered -To Hit, -Def debuff attack. (-40% to each I think?)

A SWAT Equaliser's glue grenade is annoying, but this one can be a death sentence for anyone relying on Defence or active defences like holds to stay alive. In other words, just about any character bar a Resistance based melee-er. I always take the Ghost out first befroe the Equaliser.

I'd slot them now. The difference in +Def is negligible, and you get the set bonuses as you level up.

Later on if you do hit 50 and feel the need to replace your LoTGs to close to the softcap, you can do a respec, pull them out, and give the lower level ones to an alt coming up through the ranks.
An IO'd 50 can whizz through the required 5 missions a day for the 4 days required to buy the replacement, or even buy them off the market with all the inf they earn (or a lucky purple drop).

You can't really start IO-ing a character out much before 27 at the very earliest because of the number of key sets that start at level 30. (eg Thunderstrike, Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds). Plus the number of slots available before then limits the acqusition of set bonuses.

So you're dead right on that score, Eliath.

Buit, its not that different from the pre-invention world where you couldn't really judge a set's performance before 22 when you got SOs.