Eisenzahn

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I'm sorry, but you don't play redside very often. Since when do brutes NOT herd?

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For the last 4 years? On most teams, herding makes missions take LONGER anyways. A real Brute tears through spawns so fast that gathering them up is a time waster.

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Yeah... I only herd when I'm solo, and want to AoE more than one spawn at once. And that usually takes just as long as killing them all individually would have, but makes me feel like freaking Herculese on PcP, so it's worth the effort.

I've had several instances of "AFK, Police at door". Mostly they were looking for specific drug dealers or prostitutes, who would only become a cop-worthy nuisance if they bothered the tourists. But sometimes it was more interesting. Here are some of the better ones!

Once, when the cops got enough complaints about noisy Roosters being kept in a residential area that they finally had to break up the local illegal cockfighting ring. The apartment management took them on a door-to-door search for hidden birds, turning up six in our twenty-four unit complex (and one pig, I am not kidding, they kept it in the bathtub). Later that year it was exposed that they'd dragged their feet so much on enforcing city livestock code because nearly half the local force had game birds of their own, and didn't want to appear to be using their position of authority to unfairly influence their recreational gambling on illegal violent animal combat. Ha ha, ethics!

Once, when it turned out the apartment next door, belonging to a sweet old blind lady, was being transformed into a meth lab by her nephew (fortunately he was still just accumulating materials, and hadn't begun production... that place was toxic enough already). That one was especially satisfying, because he showed up right while they were talking to us, high as a kite and convinced he was invincible, and tried (very impressively) to resist arrest. We knew it was going to be an entertaining fight when they pepper-sprayed him right in the face and he didn't even blink. They wound up dislocating his shoulder and breaking three of his ribs. I have never regretted not owning a video camera more.

Once, when my roommate turned out to have used his tourist passport to escape from mandatory military service in Romania for nearly two years. Between things stolen when he left, damage to the apartment and utilities he never caught up on, that jackass went home owing me $1,200.

And finally, once when the cops came to inform us that the building owners were being charged with all sorts of crap relating to bribing the county building inspector (the owner's wife's cousin, in fact) to ignore multiple huge and horrible safety issues that should have had the whole wretched place condemned years before, and that we had twenty four hours to find a new place to live, since earthquake damage to the building made it irreparably unsafe for habitation.

And then people ask me why I moved away from Hawaii...

Eh, as a matter of personal preference I've never enjoyed playing anyone who melees a lot with Masterminds, even ones I recognize as very good. Having to wade through a sea of NPC allies is just obnoxious to me, although it doesn't actually slow me down much now that I can shove them out of the way. It sometimes makes targeting kind of a hassle too, but that's why I set up targeting macros for favorite enemy types at the beginning of each new mission. I don't like MMs, but I can put up with up to two of them on a team. Any more than that, and they frankly don't need whatever the hell I'm playing backing them up, so I might as well leave them to it.

The MMs that really cheese me off though are the ones who think that because they're capable of absorbing an Alpha, that they have to. The ones who are disengaging from spawns half dead or less to annoy the next one. I definitely agree with the "You Attack It, You Make Sure It's Dead Before Leaving" philosophy. Racing to the next spawn can be fun sometimes, but the simple fact is that Brutes are almost always the better choice for Alpha Absorber, even if the MM could pull it off with less risk to self, because Brutes can convert incoming hostility into More Damage. MMs can convert incoming hostility into nothing at all, which is certainly valuable, but an actual positive exchange is clearly superior in most cases.

Are you sure they're not listed under "Recovery" towards the bottom of the list? I seem to recall buying some there, but that may just turn out to be worms eating my brain or something...

I know for sure I'll spend more time actually in game. Maybe I'll even finally publish one of my story arcs, instead of just poking at them for a bit and then tabbing out to see if anyone's talking about anything interesting.

When the actual game's not available, I'll likely occupy my usual hour or two of killing-time-when-work's-not-busy at my favorite old stomping ground, the White-Wolf.com forums (mostly Exalted, since the Mage Community in the OWoD section is pretty much a ghost town these days). This is provided that White Wolf's main web guy doesn't remember me, and the account bans on my dozens of sock puppet accounts have expired... sadly, since our fued ran off and on for nearly a decade before he finally snapped, I don't imagine that's likely. But I'd be sniffing back around there soon anyway, since the 2nd Edition Alchemicals book is coming soon.

I'm not sure if I've spent more time on my Elec/Elec Brute or all my assorted Storm Summoners combined, but those definitely top my list. Honorable mention to Plant Control, which has been keeping me pretty focused lately.

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Besides Ice Armour and Regen, I don't think there's any more defensive sets to give to brutes.

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Also Ninjitsu. Which seems... unlikely. But then, I said as much about a lot of the sets that they've already proliferated. I'm still really surprised that Stalkers are getting Broadswords before Brutes are, for example.

More Villain Exclusive Strike Forces, some Villain Exclusive Trials, and updates/refinements on several existing Hero Exclusive Task Forces and Trials that aren't exactly reflections of the writing team at its best. That's really all that's left that would get me excited.

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Greater ice sword isn't weaker then any other set's tier 2 power, it has a 1.96 base damage, while the strongest stalker first or second attack is 1.32. I agree ice is a lower damage set, but there is no need to exaggerate it's low damage.

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Pardon, meant Tier 3. Or rather, I meant Tier 2, but I unintentionally reverted to the definition favored by the community for another game, rather than the one accepted here. In this case, to specify the second window in which a new power becomes available, where the first two powers would both be Tier 1... not that that's actually applicable to Tanker Melee though, so it's failure on my part both in communicating clearly and in maintaining consistency in my internal logic.

I sure hope so. I've always wanted to make my assorted forms (including other costumes meant to represent other species of humanoids the Khelds have learned to mimic over the years) have different colored effects, to better differentiate them. And I'd also like my Warshade stuff to tend more towards a good deep stable-event-horizon-electromagnetic-anomaly Blue or a nice faded dead-planet-at-the-end-of-time/space Charcoal than Purple. Purple makes me think of Mixed Berry Smoothies, which is neither cosmic or intimidating.

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What's wrong with Tanker Ice Melee? Legitimate question here, I have no experience with the set, I'm just curious.

Personally I'd just like Stalker Ice Melee with the Ninja Blade AS animation and an ice sword.

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Low damage traded for good control. Possibly the lowest damage of any Melee set in the game... I'm having a hard time thinking of any others that could compare. An Ice Melee Tanker can play like a Controller to a certain extent, but he's going to take a long time killing anything himself.

A Stalker with a direct port would find himself particularly frustrated by the fact that his biggest single target attack (after AS) is weaker than a couple other sets Tier 2 attacks, his second biggest Single Target attack is a slow-recharging DoT (But also a Hold, which is nice), and that his Tier 9 answers the question of "Would Foot Stomp be all that great if you didn't have Rage?" with a clear and resounding "No". Also, all that Control I mentioned? A lot of it is wrapped up in Ice Patch, a zero damage PBAoE Knockdown that would almost certainly be the sacrifice to make room for AS. So a direct port would have crappy damage without the level of control that "officially" balances it out for Tankers.

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I still haven't gotten an explanation for why Stalkers would even want Ice Melee, one of the worst damage sets going.

So, why?

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You make a simple mistake. Many people say "I'd like a Stalker Ice Primary." No one at all says "I'd like Tanker Ice Melee ported directly to Stalkers." That, I think we can all agree, would be terrible, and all attempts at assembling a Stalker Ice Primary out of Tanker Ice Melee so far have shown signs of heavy enough modification that making a whole new set from scratch isn't that much further off.

Edit: Imagining a Stalker Ice Melee set, I honestly look at a lot of the animations for Spines and Thorns. Anyone got a link to an animation of the Spines AS? Although a rehash of the Katana AS using an Ice Blade would be pretty awesome too.

Brutes, by three times as many as the nearest competitors (Scrappers and Stalkers). Currently got nine Brutes of varying flavors, four of them 50s, the rest 30 and under.

Sometimes I wish more players started out Redside, where AT "roles" are much more open to interpretation, and everybody's expected to contribute heavily to offense. Then, when confronted with Blueside ATs that seem to correspond closely to traditional MMORPG standards, they'd be able to more quickly recognize how much more potential and flexibility all ATs actually have.

Atlas Park and Cap Au Diable. Especially Cap. I can avoid Atlas entirely if I try hard, but Redside keeps throwing reasons to go back to Cap at me, and the zone design is especially terrible for clustering all the useful bits right around the Black Market and AE building. If they'd open up routes to Bloody Bay and the Midnighter's Club in other zones, many of my characters would never enter Cap Au Diable again.

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Meanwhile Mind has FOUR AoE mezzes.

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Correction. Five. Five AoE Mezzes.

Mass Hypnosis.
Telekinesis.
Total Domination.
Terrify.
Mass Confusion.

Five AoE Mezzes. Ah-hah-hah-hah! *Thunderclap*

/TheCount

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They recently buffed the base speed of Flight and Hover, which made enhancements more effective, which makes it easier to get to the cap. I sitll have Swift on all of my fliers since i need it to get to stamina anyway, but a single fly IO in swift and two in Fly is enough to get tot he cap now, it may even be 1 in each but I don't have the desire to respec to find that out.

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Is that so? Hmm. May have to fiddle with mids and see if I can get Fly capped on my Brute with just the base slot. She's Electric Armor, so has Lightning Reflexes in addition to Swift and Set Bonuses. Not that I need the extra slot for anything else, but why not try, eh?

Edit: Nope, no good. Best I can do without sacrificing other set bonuses for more than my current 15% Flight Boost appears to be 52.4 mph. On the other hand, it looks like I can swap out the 50 Flight IOs from Swift and Lightning Reflexes for Run Speed IOs, beat the Flight Cap with only two slots in Fly by 0.2 mph, and have a 33.6 mph run speed without Sprint even running (40.8 mph with a 50 EndRed IO in Swift, 43.8 mph with a 50 Run Speed IO). Not too shabby, when my damage relies so heavily on getting to the next spawn before Fury can decay too much.

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I did Ashley McKnight's mission the other night, where you have to retrieve the 4 amulets.

Solo at diff 4, level 33 - the prison room contained a Succubus, a Hellfrost, a Ruin Mage, 3 Behemoth Overlords and a Rikti Chief Soldier. Thanfully I was able to fight 'only' two of them at a time (!) but I have never seen such a concentration of bosses when soloing as I did in that mission.

I don't mind the guards, but the doors themselves take a very very long time to break down, or at least did with my SS/ Brute.

Edit: Is there something about the layout of that room's spawn points that causes it to have a very dense population of enemies?

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I think that mission's bugged to have a much higher than normal Boss appearance rate. Last time I did it, it had a boss in every single spawn on the 3rd difficulty setting. I used it as a measuring stick to see how my Plant/Thorn Dom compared before and after the I15 changes, in fact.

Still... that jail room is an absolute beast. Compare it to Council or Longbow jail rooms, where I've never even seen one guard, or Arachnos ones where there's usually only one guard spawn by the cells and it's easily avoided by hugging the walls.

I've "Soloed" it a couple times, not that it really felt like it with that many EB allies. The hardest part for me is always getting the whole stupid group of them to follow me without getting split up.

Now, the Villain Silos... that's a real challenge, even on Heroic. 13 consecutive EB ambushes, with only two EB allies... one of whom is Black Scorpion, and worse than useless, but the other being Ghost Widow makes up the balance. I considered my Brute's IO build done when I could solo it without the allies, without temporary powers or inspirations, and without dying, on the 4th difficulty setting. I've only done so once out of dozens of attempts, and it was 99% luck.

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Super Strength, Stone Armor and Kinetics are your honorable mentions?! None of these should even be mentioned in an "underperforming" conversation. I am mad at myself for bringing them up again.

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All of them have the "Overpowered Tier 9 propping up an otherwise kind of crappy set" feel to me... the same feel that Psionic Assault just gave up with the nerf of PSW and buff of practically everything else.

Some players like having one really spectacular trick to rely on almost exclusively, and others like having a mix of good powers available from the very beginning. To that second set of players, yeah, there's no question that SS and Stone Armor suck. Kin, to a lesser degree. I can imagine playing a Kin without Fulcrum Shift a lot easier than a SS without Foot Stomp or Stoner without Granite...

I'll be setting Super Strength to whatever color I can find that will make the strobe effect on Rage less painful, turning my Mind/Psi Dom's powers indigo, and making at least one of my Blueside Electric characters Mu Red.

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I've a feeling at least half the answers in this thread are going to be completely wrong. So unless four or five people list the same set, take it with a grain of salt.

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well im going to cry now....psi blasters have been mentioned over and over again. waaaaah.
i just got my psi blaster to lvl 30
siggh. guess ill delete it and remake a new one.

so is it just psi blast the primary thats bad?
or is mental manipulation as a secondary ok?

and now im feeling very depressed about my electric armor brute....

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Are you actually enjoying your Psi Blast character? Then why care what other people are saying?

And as far as Electric Armor for Brutes goes, it was once the unquestioned king of Brute Secondaries. What changed? Power Creep. Paritcularly how much more IOs help Willpower and Super Reflexes than they do an all-resist set. Electric Armor is still just as valuable as it was back when it was FotM, but there are other even stronger options. Now, Stalker Electric Armor... yeah, that's a heap of ugly. And while I'm on the subject of Electricity... Electric Blast could definitely use a little something extra.

Some ideas I use for different slots...

Normal Hero Costume

Early Days Hero Costume (The version of his outfit the guy wore before he got corporate sponsorship, or whatever. Think Spiderman during his brief amateur wrestling career in the first film)

Crazy Power Surge (Auras, mostly, but sometimes actual physical changes if the character actually transforms into something under great stress. My Plant/Thorn Dom has a second costume that's all the leafy bits and glows green, for example, that's tied to my Domination button in a macro).

Battle Damage (Liberal use of ripped robes and pants, the Blast color pattern, and Camo face pattern for dirt or smoke)

Civilian Casual (Even Batman takes off the cowl and hangs around the mansion every so often... granted, only when he's recovering from some greivous injury, but it's still something)

Civilian Business (Does your hero have a dayjob for roleplaying purposes in addition to badge purposes? What does he wear at work?)

Civilian Formal (For the occasional RP Wedding or High Society Event. Or for the one RWZ mission with the diplomats so you can ignore Fusionette's criticism)

Heroic Formal (What would my hero wear, if his normal costume wouldn't feel appropriate for getting a medal from the President, for example?)

Heroic Casual (One of my characters uses Power Armor, and I made a version of his suit with just the boots and one glove, for if he only had time to put on the most essential bits, or he was hanging around in his lab tinkering with the suit but not wearing the full thing)

Evil Doppleganger (Seriously, how common are "[MacGuffin] turned me evil" stories in comics? A ton of my characters have costumes built for their own antithesis... usually a shade more complex than just adding a goatee)

Classic Era (A couple of my characters are Franchise Heroes. Either they've inherited the family powers, or picked up the identity from an older hero who's retired. Both of them have updated the official look, but kept a version of the oldschool version around for photo ops or whatever)

Special Environment Gear (Look to action figures for this one... the most common variants are Arctic, Aquatic and Outer Space)

Period Costumes (Ok, so our time travel options are limited to the very recent past, Ancient Rome, and the 60s in one Villainside Arc. But you never know for sure when those options might expand)

Super Group Unity (Never a bad idea if you want to gain favor with your superiors, even though it rarely happens in actual comics... mostly with the various X-Teams)

And Now I Mean Business (Upgrade your Shoulder Pads! Add an extra shine to your Big Honkin' Gauntlets! Throw on some Belts, with Pouches! Change your Big Goofy Smile for a Constipated Grimace. Like the regular costume, but it's you prepping up for something slightly more serious with a more heavily armored version of your outfit, but beware overdoing it... don't want to look like you were drawn by Rob Liefield)

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Okay, what am I missing here?

Every time I go into a PvP zone, it's made very clear that there are no rules. Everything goes. That's been the mantra on every occasion I've set foot in there.

So this professor operates under that agreement, and gets pages worth of hate for it? I'm confused.

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Twixt was... I'm not sure how to explain it. He stood around and droned people. If he was attacked or threatened (in game, such as it looking like someone might kill his character) he ran. Either into the base or out of the zone or wherever.

I'll let you decide how much fun that was for people in the zone with him. But you should probably be able to guess (unless you're Twixt, I suppose) that people are going to get frustrated at your behaviour. Frustrated people tend to rant in whatever manner is available to them. In this case that would be the pages and pages about what an idiot Twixt is.

Yes, there are no rules against what he did. You'll notice that no action was ever taken against him by NCSoft over his behaviour in the PvP zones. That doesn't mean he wasn't making the game as unfun as possible for the people around him.

And yeah, I'm so thrilled to learn that he needed to do a study to learn that people don't like those they consider jerks and griefers. Or that groups tend to favor people who follow the norms of that group. Really shocking stuff. This wasn't funded with any sort of grant money, right?

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It wasn't just Droning. Droning is obnoxious, but the only consequence it has is wasted time. He was a specialist in camping out among NPCs friendly to his faction and using TP Foe to drag other players into that same spawn, then using Mez effects to lock them into place (he favored Fear, because it's rarely resisted even by Melee ATs) while the NPCs got the kill. The difference? Drones don't give you debt.

In other games with more serious penalties for dying, this is called MPK for "Monster Player-Kill" and considered one of the most unambiguous forms of actionable griefing, the kind of thing that the GMs treat the way ours would a whole coalition of X-Men Clones ERPing in broadcast. In FFXI for example, it was a tactic employed almost exclusively by RMT farmers to keep competitors from camping the same areas, since they couldn't attack said competitors directly. It's never caught on as a griefing technique in this game, because we're not competing for outdoor spawns either for Loot or Prime Leveling Camps (in fact our only major reward-granting Outdoor Spawns, Giant Monsters, are built to encourage you to invite as many people as you can get to help instead of competing for the kill, and everything else respawns too quick to matter), and because even at its worst Debt has always been a cakewalk compared to some of the alternatives. Also, it's bloody hard to do in this game. The more famous MPK attempts I've heard of typically involve multiple Giant Monsters being dragged into Portal Court before the drones were added.

Most of the PvP community was frankly baffled by him. He wasn't getting credit for these kills, since his only contributions were two non-damaging powers before teleporting away and letting the critters do their jobs. And, as noted in the article, his aversion to actually engaging in Player vs. Player Combat generated enough ill will that his own faction refused to assist him. I saw far more people speculating about his mental health than actually trying to communicate with him. And when people weren't paying enough attention, he'd fabricate a "kill log" in the forums, listing his PvP victories, the authenticity of which was clearly to be questioned both because NPCs did all the damage and got the kill credit, and because this was before Cut and Paste function was added to game text. If actual Screen Shots were ever provided, I must have missed them.

The funny thing is, I've seen the old "it was a social experiment" excuse trotted out by a lot of jackasses on the internet trying to cover for some obnoxious behavior or another, but this is the first time I've seen that card played by an actual Sociologist. That is, if the guy's legit, and the article isn't just a new chapter of a wildly elaborate ongoing trolling.

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We're a pretty unpleasable fanbase. It's strange - I wonder if other MMOs have this same kind of polarising opinions amongst their user base. It's not enough that someone disagree with changes, or aren't enjoying them - it has to be part of the us-vs-them, the incompetent dupes vs the knowing elites.

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Go look at the WoW forums one of these days. Or dig up the archives of the old EQ1 forums, from the time it was the king of MMOs. Or the FFXI forums from its short reign at the top of the subscription charts (although at least 2/3rds of it will be in Japanese). The common trends will be immediately apparent. There you will see a seething mass of furious tormented souls the likes of which make the murky brimstone-reeking bowels of Hell itself look like Disneyland.