DrObvious

Longtime,

I'm going to have to ask you to either stop commenting on shortened animation changes, or change you name.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
... Over 80 in the zone, there were over 16 AMs up, and probably around 30 controllers. With the AMs I would say that should have been more then enough to hold him...

[/ QUOTE ]
Infinity's experience pre-I7 has been that about 30 trollers and 10AMs kept him held. I figure either your Victory server numbers were off, you had some weird server issues and/or disconnects, or they did more to the Hamidon than allow him to attack while held. Given the top-notch type of communication we receive from the devs, I wouldn't rule out the latter.

Someone should tell team-dev that ignoring threat level damage multipliers is not the same as ignoring the damage. Taunt aside, whoever is dealing more of it should get the aggro.

Now that they've buffed his AI and powers, where is the increased reward to match the increased risk?

[/ QUOTE ]
Given Victory's experiance, pre-I7, we should have kept him held. We have a long and glorious history of getting hami done with right around the fewest people as possible. This was one of our largest raids in a while.

<ul type="square">[*]We had very good communication from the leaders[*]We had no dissruption from greifers[*]We had more people than needed before[*]We seemed to have very good cooperation, even through the incredible amount of squishy deaths[/list]
And we still weren't able to pull this off. Why? Because the devs took away our ability to judge what is going on. This doesn't make this more interesting. This doesn't make this more interactive. Hell, this doesnt' even mean that the best practice for holding Hami changes.

This just makes it more likely to fail. A raid more likely to fail is going to attract less people. A raid that doesn't attract enough people will not get off the ground. Victory already is having trouble attracting enough people.

Why make this change?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Multiple empowerment stations will stack the buffs that are offered (by design). If we made the buffs as good as players "expect" right out the gate, they'd be WAY too good when stacked.

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you serious? You do realize this provides nothing (by design) to a resource strapped, small SG, while providing a large, organized PvP, who can farm a single av for a week and a half, a huge advantage for 15 mintes, aka 1 match.

[/ QUOTE ]

AVs are (with a few exceptions) guaranteed to drop a "special" salvage (Alien Tech, Spells of Power...). There are no empowerment recipes that use these.

AVs also have a chance to drop "regular" salvage, but it seems to me that farming AVs would be one of the worst possible ways to gather salvage for empowerment buffs.

So while there are reasons to dislike the way empowerment buffs are set up, this is not one of them.

[/ QUOTE ]
Well, then replace "farm av's" with whatever activity is most likely to drop salvage. ::EyeRoll::

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
On Test, the buffs seemed underwhelming. I just had a chance to test them on Live in exactly the kind of circumstances for which they were meant.

Up against Nemesis, EB version. I brew up a couple of buffs: Knockback Protection (only a single tech material, good and cheap) and Disorient Protection (costly, but I don't want to be stunned).

KB protection seems to work, but halfway through the fight I'm suddenly reeling around, stunned. Couldn't pop the health insp that would have saved me. Hmm. Didn't I just invest some fairly rare salvage in some stun protection?

These stations have the potential to be really cool, but as it stands (whether by bug or by design) they just aren't worth the salvage it takes to make them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Multiple empowerment stations will stack the buffs that are offered (by design). If we made the buffs as good as players "expect" right out the gate, they'd be WAY too good when stacked.

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you serious? You do realize this provides nothing (by design) to a resource strapped, small SG, while providing a large, organized PvP, who can farm a single av for a week and a half, a huge advantage for 15 mintes, aka 1 match.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
You know that's half illedgable

[/ QUOTE ]

Illegible?

[/ QUOTE ]
indubidibly

You know that's half illedgable

I haven't gotten a chance to read all of this, but big props on writing a pvp guide. There's a real lack of them, either because people are lazy, or worse, think they are giving away all their "trade secrets".

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I haven't had time to get on test, but I was wondering what people are reporting about the changes to hurricane. Anyone have any stories?

[/ QUOTE ]

This is as good a place to put this, as any:

I checked in a few Hurricane changes today that QA is going to look at. In Theory, these changes should mean that for PvE, Hurricane acts Exactly as it did before the previous change, while in PvP, it should act exactly as it does currently. Hopefully this change will get a green light from QA -- I've spent quite a bit of time on it over the last few days.

[/ QUOTE ]
Castle, thanks for replying to my thread. This makes a lot of sense to me, assuming the devs feel that hurricane is over powered in pvp in more ways than just wall pinning, and not over powered in pve. I hope this sort of "functions one way in pvp, and one way in pve" will continue. I like this trend. I can think of one other recent change that needs this kind of love too, but i don't think this thread is the place for it.

I haven't had time to get on test, but I was wondering what people are reporting about the changes to hurricane. Anyone have any stories?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
looks like i got stickied!

[/ QUOTE ]

You're thread has been officially put into the groove yard of forgot threads.

[/ QUOTE ]
Named as such when Disco was put there and killed off.

[ QUOTE ]
LOL....lets just sticky everything.

[/ QUOTE ]
Shouldn't be a problem if you bring everything to the right parties.

darth, while I have no desire to roll up an ice/em tanker, let me say thanks for putting together such a good PvP guide. To many people want to hold onto their "trade secrets", or just don't know how to build a good guide.

Np Please note that this sheed doesn't yet take into account damage enhancers. If someone has an easy way to put that in there, or wants to update the sheet themselfs, that'd be great

Ok, it looks like the next step is to have everyone go out there and find the scalars for their attacks. To that end, I have tossed together a quick spreadsheet to automate the calculation of that. You can download the most recent copy here. I entered the default values for a lvl 31 scrappers brawl calculations from before.

[ QUOTE ]
Brawl is a melee attack, so it uses the level 31 Scrapper Melee Table value of -46.72 * .36 = 16.82

[/ QUOTE ]

For now, i don't know if iankona wants us to spam the numbers here, but we can use this for now, until he decides what he wants to do.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
A buff for EM?

Did I log into the Praetorian dimension or something?

[/ QUOTE ]


LOL, my thoughts exactly. You KNOW that 100s of EM board reading tanks are just sitting there SHOUTING at their monitor for this topic to dry up and go away without getting nerf bat aggro.


And in other news Stalkers are complaining that AS doesn't do enough damage.

[/ QUOTE ]

If the things Blasters and Stalkers can do with EM haven't made us Nerf EM yet, absolutely nothing said here will. Carry on.

EDIT: Said Scrappers, meant Stalkers.

[/ QUOTE ]

One time, my tanker used Total Focus, and the apartment building I live in exploded.

Its true.

[ QUOTE ]
He lives!

(Notice how he completely ignored Celtic's question? )

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, just like the rest of victory.

[ QUOTE ]
... don't know if the game could support this...

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm almost 100% sure gravity powers' secondary effect is -speed, but no -recharge.

Blueeyed, that's a great new sig. I'm going to steal it . Doh, I was going to quote Alice's resturant here, but I see its got some objectional stuff. Anyway, yeah, that really is the crux of the problem. If there is going to be strong niche protection for one one class, it really must flow both ways.

It is very disheartening to see this. I hope that this opinion by the devs changes, but I'll be supprised if it does.

Sigh. I'm really glad you were willing to be this upfront with the comunity. No dev has done that with us, as is obvious, since we are getting so pissed about what is apparently a central and obvious direction taken by the devs.

Thank you for communicating with us. I think many of the answers you have given us are horrible, but I really appreciate the direct and upfront manor they were given, as well as the work that went into finding/researching/testing/compiling.

I guess I'm also a little pissed that so many of the melee sets problems seemed to have been resolved to their satisfaction, and we are basicly getting "suck it up, controller are *supposed* to be better than defenders".

Castle, I'm so glad you came out and said that a number of Defender primaries work better as Controller secondaries. Now I have no reason to feal guilty about giving up on defenders.

I'm also glad to see a dev say this, for when I try to explain to my SG mates why I won't be playing another defender after lovingly bringing my Rad/Dark deftroller to 50. If I want a defender, I'll just make a Ill/* controller.

/em yes, I'm pissed. Maybe I'll settle down later, but when I see ths, it kind of makes my blood boil.

[ QUOTE ]
I think the most important thing we should be getting across to the Devs is this:

This is a super hero game and aerial combat is a big part of the genre and should be part of the game. Its not. That alone should be worth your investigation.

[/ QUOTE ]

QFT

I just about feel out of my chair at the end of the sky raider ST. It was so interesting and unique to see all those sky raiders around the big oil rig thingy.

[ QUOTE ]
(I got spoiled by the Holiday Jet Pack, too!)

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry to double post, but this made me think of an important question. After 30+ days of the jingle jet, did you feel overpowered with a low cost flight?

[ QUOTE ]
Hover: We might buff it some, at some point. However, it should never be an effective travel power.

Flight: I'll talk to geko about it. No promises. (I got spoiled by the Holiday Jet Pack, too!)

[/ QUOTE ]

2 direct points here:

Hover: I want this to be as viable in PvP and PvE as sprint+swift, or cj + hurdle. I would be willing to invest an additional power slot in fitness to get this. I have a toon with the flight pool who will be dropping it at 25 when it begins pvp, because there is absolutly no advantage over the other modes of non travel power movement. I want to be competative with hover, nothing more.

Fly: Others have covered this, but fly provides the least survivablity for the highest end cost, AND requires micromanaging between it and hover. Superspeed provides stealth and the best horizontal movement. SJ provides vertical and horizontal escape at faster rates than fly can get in either direction, as well as being the least likely to be slowed in both PvP and PvE. Teleport provides the best speed, and a quick way to drop rad toggles, at the expense of high end (but not higher than fly). Fly provides the advantage that no verticle obstical is too high, a feature shared with teleport, at a very, very high end cost.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I grabbed a copy of the "Defender Issues" post a couple weeks ago and am working through it in my spare time. Considering the length of it, I will probably have gotten through it sometime in Janurary.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just a quick update: It's probably going to take longer than expected for this. I'm sorry, but things are busy, busy, busy here. I'm pretty much booked solid, but I'll find time to get through this as soon as I can.


[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for communicating with us and letting us know whats going on. Keeping the community informed does a lot to create good-will towards Cryptic in the playerbase

[/ QUOTE ]

QFT

[ QUOTE ]
These are good tips, but this is all pretty much common sense, isn't it? I mean, as you said, an AV is pretty much a mob with a lot of HP and damage, and the steps you outline are usually my standard steps in any fight (maybe switching the places of damage and secondary effects).
That said, outlining an order of priorities may be very helpful to those new to support archetypes.

[/ QUOTE ]

As I said at the top, I'm writing this specificly for a SG mate who was having trouble figuring out what to do. It may be common sense to us, but he opened the fight with Atomic Blast. If I went ahead and wrote it up anyway, I may as well share with the community.

[ QUOTE ]
Actually, often in larger teams, the killing is so fast that a Rad defender or controller will not have time enough to put down the RI/EF debuffs before the potential anchor is killed.

[/ QUOTE ]
I've never been in a team that killed an AV faster than I can cast RI and EF on them. What AV and team makeup have you done that did this?