DrMike2000

2 Defenders can work really well together.

2 Empaths is beyond good, if you want a themed pair.
Kinetics and Force Field also works very nicely, both filling in each others weaknesses. I played Kin/Elec and FF/Sonic.

Other duos I've enjoyed:
Sonic/Energy Defender and Peacebringer.
Fire/Energy Blaster and Dark/Rad Defender.
2 Fire/Rad Controllers.
2 Energy/Pain Corrupters. (Nowhere near as good as 2 Empaths, and very slow at first.)

Basically, on a tooled-up time-invested main character, recharge helps absolutely everything.

It makes you tougher - Demonic/Eye of the Magus is up more often. Being ablke to cheat death when you plans go awry every 8 minutes is pretty big.
It solves end problems - Geas of the Kind Ones is up more often.
You hit harder - Frenzy or Call to Justice are up more frequently. Moreso than unehanced Build Up in fact.
Powers designed as "sometimes powers" become part of your way of life - once per radio mission god-modes instead. I definitely felt this on my level 50 Grav/Empath once I started purpling and collecting LotG's.

And then numerous powers like Mind Link, Eclipse, empathy Auras, World of Pain all cause recharge to boost other characteristics far better than the set bonuses to those characteristics could.

_23X_'s comment: "also recharge isn't splintered like say def is you don't get recharge to AOE range and melee so it adds up a lot faster."
really got me thinking. Imagine if recharge was splintered, like you got a bonus of "+5% Recharge on damage attacks" or "+5% Recharge on defensive powers"

I've tried slotting my MA/SR Stalker for +Dam, got about 30% in set bonuses as well as softcapped defence. It was OK. But I'm sure slotting for Recharge (just like my Empath, Warshade, Pain Corrupter duo, every Dominator, ad nauseum) would have resulted in better damage output, what with better attacks recharging more quickly and Focus Chi being up more often. That seems wrong.
I'm pretty sure the values for +Dam set bonuses could be doubled without brekaing game balance.

Lack of good resistance bonuses - I can live with that. Resistance can't be overcome like Defence can (except by unresistable -Res debuffs, which are almost non-existent) and allowing us to build for both could be tooo much. And resistance users still benefit form layering defence with their native resistance.
And we have the alternative to build for +HP. I havent tried that route to see how effective it is yet.

Meaningful mez resistance values would be nice, and very much worth building for on some squishies. If a Malta stun grenade could be brought down from 30 seconds to 15, I'd probably do that for some characters.
Likewise, hold duration and Stun duration bonuses could be made at least twice as big. Currently they're measured in fractions of a second for most powers.

+Movement speed bonuses are an odd one. Make them too strong and they could get unwieldy or unwanted. But, it would be nice to be able to build a dedicated speedster who could have unsupressed combat movement via set bonuses and slotted sprint maybe? I must try that...
[Edit - this had really got me fired up, actually. My Elec/Elec Dom is a superspeedster....Screw recharge, I'm going for movement speed and ranged def and kiting tactics. This could really work...]


I love Kyria's post too, by the way

Its a great idea for high defence builds, and also for combining 3D movement AND immobilise protection.
Together they provde the same defence as Weave, for only two power picks instead of 3 and for less endurance. The downside of course is that they tie up two power pools, but if you can build around that, there is no downside.

I agree that SR takes far too long to get good.
Both Shields and Ninjutsu combine the Ranged & AoE toggle sand thus get AoE defence for the first half of your career for free, in addition to the offensive bonuses. In return, mature SR gets the best Defence Debuff Resistance and is cheaper to Soft-cap, which is neither here nor there if you can afford to soft-cap the other sets.

Switching Evasion and Lucky sounds like a good idea. By the time they come (28) your worst endurance woes are over, so getting the passive first just means lower values for 7 levels.
There are precedents for switching power orders around, War Mace did this to get a better early attack chain.

One other gripe I have with SR - there's nowhere native to stick the Steadfast IO. Almost every other defence set gets one eg Night Widows get a token Psi resist in the mez toggle.
This works counter to SR's status as "just defence and the best at defence".
I don't think it would hurt the set to pack a small amount of token S/L reistance in Focussed Fighting, for example, the way that Shield does.

Temp powers can help.

Kinetic Dampener Temp power provides 30% Energy resistance as well as 16% Smash/Lethal Defence. Buy it form the market. get the middle one of the three on offer, it requires the cheapest salvage.
That could be handy for doing a Rikti Arc, say.

There's the Wedding Band temp power of course. 30% resistance to all for 2 hours charge from Stephanie Peebles in Striga Island. You can get it as many times as you like via Ouroborous, but the repeat copies after the first time have less duration.

About the only half-decent set bonus is Kinetic Crash - 3 pieces give 2.5% vs Smashing only. You could probably put them in Kick on the way to getting Tough if you dont plan to use the actual attack much.

And putting in bids for medium orange insps is always a good idea.

Oh yeah, get your SG to get one of these:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Empowerm...rment_Stations

The resistance buffs are just 5%, but every little helps.

My characters are all from somewhere else.
I make them in groups of 6 to 10, a team from the future, a team from an alternate steampunk world, a team from Praetoria so far.

Its a recurring theme for me. My magnus opus Freedom Force mod was "The Strangers" - a group of disparate heroes from other worlds or hidden societies within our own.

And I've yet to make a magic based character, I think.

The problem's nothing to do with performance (saist, you really outdid yourself there...) or the lack of animation blending.

How is the animation for bending down and picking up an object different from a generic attack animation? Both require starting and ending in a neutral pose in order to flow onto the next action.

The major problem with picking up and throwing things in CoX is tracking these objects across the network. Propel and Hurl are just animated FX in the same way a fireball is, and do not synch. This is why I can throw a forklift but you see a coffin or gargoyle with Propel.

Picking up a car thats parked in Kings Row is quite different - the base object has to dissappear, and synch this state to all other players, and then respawn at some point. If two of you try to pick up the same car, one of you has to get there first.

This is of course possible in an MMO, CO proves that, but it wouldn't surprise me if retro-fitting this to CoX would be a lot of work if the network code wasn't designed to do this. As far as I can tell, the network code only synchs characters and static objects like glowies and mayhem destructables.

All of this is my idle speculation, of course, but I've been making games professionally for over ten year, so at least its an educated guess.

And speaking of opinions, throwing cars at supervillains utterly rocks! I'd love to do it in this game one day.

Getting a tether to not look bad would be a lot of work. What happens when you go down an elevator with your victim on a leash, never mind round a corner?

The easy solution would be to teleport them out.

We've got hospital teleporters that pretty much every single character uses. Have a standard prison teleport system used for hostages. Its not much of a stretch to have your villain with a similar setup to their base or the local u-Storage or whatever.

The PPD "Police Line: Do Not Cross" hologram bands and the Seer teleportation FX would make a good start for this.



And yes please to the piggyback option! Its every dual boxers dream!

No worries

The next question with a Jericho-style possession is what happens when the host gets damaged.
I guess the obvious answer is that they take damage and the player doesn't, they're sort of stored in limbo (maybe regenerating, maybe not) and pop out as harmed or unharmed as they were when they entered.
Same questions with endurance I suppose - you'd be using their end not yours to fire off their attacks.

This leads to some odd situations.

The player can hide indefinitley in a host, sort of like Phase Shift. I guess the obvious solution is have them eject automatically after 30 seconds.

If the host is untargettable or unharmable by allies, then the Mind Controller can grief missions by possessing a key NPC, eg the boss you have to defeat. If there's a timer, then its no worse than the existing phase abilities - you can be a dick and keep phasing the boss, but it wont last forever.

If the host can be damaged by other players, you could lose a nice host by splash damage. But I guess that already happens with confuse - you can confuse a Sky raider FFG and then have a teammate shoot it down.

Can the possessed body be attacked by their allies? If not, you've got Phase Shift with the ability to fight back, zero risk for reward. So I guess the host body while possessed is targettable by everyone, friend and foe.

And if the host gets held, should the player be able to eject at that point still, by turning off their posession toggle I guess. (You can turn off toggles when held, can't you?)

You suggested a brand new power mechanism for Mind Control. Fair enough.

I then said I've seen this attempted in two other games, and it wasn't as much
fun as it first sounded due to the limited abilities of most NPCs.

I then said the current Confuse/Deceive powers do this so much better.

And I wasn't calling you "buddy", I said the Power Tank would attack their "buddy" - the Paragon Protector ie their ally.

What didn't I get? I'm trying to discuss your idea, not piss you off.

Just to clarify - what are you picturing happens to you when you possess a target? Do you ghost out like Jericho from the Teen Titans (who would enter the bodies of his targets) or do you stand there immobile and uncontrollable while you control the NPC?

Does the camera shift to behind the NPC you've possessed as if you were them?

Both games I mentioned used the ghosting method, because leaving a vulnerable player body isn't a good idea. While this works better for gameplay, its not so good concept-wise for the standard Mind Controller like Xavier or Jean Grey.

I intend to find out.
My Incarnate candidate is a Gravity/Empathy Controller, not a powerhouse build by any means, either solo or teamed.
But it will be interesting to see how far I can push her.
Purpling her out and getting all the accolade powers was pretty cool, I see the incarnate system as an extension of that process.

The problem with a Grant Flight power is that it doesn't provide the target with the means to turn off their own flight.
Unless you make the flight granted incompatible with Sprints.

Come to think of it, that might be better than the current aura implementation, although with a target-controlled off switch, the aura could also be made larger.

Yeah, my ideal implementation would be a single target Grant Flight - lasts 4 minutes and can be deactivated by the user via Sprint. Good thinking, plain guy

And for extra style points, put the Ragnorak knockdown proc in Chain Fences. I love this one in my Grvaity Controller, whose immobilise also lacks -KB.

Defence is much more easily counteracted, which is probably why we're allowed to build it up via IOs.

Defence debuffs and +To Hit can cut through it, and do so far more commonly that unresistable Res debuffs.

Build for Defence either way. Softcap defence based secondaries, and build up layered Defence and Resistance on res based secondaries.

Make Group Fly not affect teammates if they turn Sprint on.


Group Fly suffers from 3 problems - the Acc penalty, the relative speeds of the allies and user, and the fact that allies can't turn it off.

The first two are easy fixes - remove the Acc penalty and make the allies fly a little faster than the user (including slotting). The third problem, giving allies control of when they can and can't fly, has always been trickier.

This could work, since Sprint is a toggle that everyone has access to. Turning it on sort of signifies the desire to run rather than fly, so it makes a certain kind of sense. There's precedence of a kind with Rooted and some travel powers, CJ and Ninja Run, or the way that sprints turn each other off.

I have the same setup on all my characters - ALT+right arrow toggle sprint, so it would work for me.
Does anyone have a setup that this wouldn't work for, eg the "speed on demand" binds that turn sprint on and off dynamically in response to movment?

Prestige Sprints should probably be included, which could make this marginally harder to code.

What do you guys think? Would this work?

I've seen this done in other games - Freedom Force vs The Third Reich had it, and there was a first person shooter that revolved completely around this mechanism called Messiah. It wasn't that great, to be honest.

I don't know what it would bring to CoX that Confuse doesn't already do better.
Most NPCs have fairly limited range of powers, so being them often turns out to be not as fun as it sounds at first. And possession would tie up the Mind Controller's full attention, whereas Confuse takes care of an enemy for a very long duration without you having to pay further attention to them.

Confusing a Power Tank will 9 times out of 10 cause them to clobber their Paragon Protector buddy (or someone else) without you having to spend any more time thinking about it.

An Illusion Controller Superior Invis and Deceive works really well for simulating posession, albeit multiple targets at once. I'm loving mine so far.

No. Power Boost never boost -Res debuffs.

I really enjoyed Storm/Ice for its heavy duty AoE firepower.