Eldagore

Stone/electric brute. Most fun a brute can have, every attack looks like smash, sounds like smash, one power is even called smash. Smash with fists!! Guy falls down? Smash him into the ground with smash hammer!! Guy standing there, trying to hit you? Smash him into the air with even bigger smash hammer!! Stomp on the ground and make a line of smash that hits foes so hard they fall down and get dazed!

I mean, Super strength is a performer, and footstomp is pretty smashy in its own right. But One shotting guys with siesmic smash, two handed smashdown in 1.5 seconds? Thats brute style right there.

I will concede that earlier builds before the animation changes were more fun, by quite a lot mostly because you could unload on a hard target in mere seconds(of course your poor endo bar paid for it) and old fury made stone melee truly a monster.

IMO, they should up the base dmg on tremor so the long animation correlates to the dmg delivered. As it is, you expect buildings to collapse, cars to explode, enemy spawns 12 blocks away to fall down when your avatar finally lands that massive crushing strike, but end up dissapointed when it only does like 40% of a minions health(at mid level fury even) I do not think that would "break" Stone melee- the changes to the mallets more then negate what a new change to tremor would bring to the set overall.

MA is a solid middle of the pack performer. A few things to consider-
MA "feels" like it takes a lot of endurance to use. I think It really isnt unbalanced, but the set lends itself to non stop attacking, the moves all really blend together well. A few powers are real shiners, like storm kick, but really the whole set is pretty well rounded and you can pretty much pick the attacks you like and you will succeed.

The general consensus is MA is not a set to be IO'd into a crazy farm build or the like. This hardly means it sucks, it just doesnt have that x factor a few other sets have that allow for crazyness. This is not a bad thing if you are just playing the character for fun, and not with a goal of l33t ub3rzst in mind.


A few things you shoud decide when considering build direction-

Solo, or lots of teams? Solo, I would say you really should lean towards an armor set that can either help with recovery, or isnt endo intensive. Willpower works, regen works really well(quick recovery, and only one toggle, plus no redraw) I have seen good builds for dark armor, and SR even, but those will require more attention to the blue bar. I have an old MA/regen I like to get out once in a while, and IMO that character isnt super powerful, but he is non stop and really a hoot.

IO slotting if you go that route should also consider teaming or solo. Recovery really is that important- if you dont have enough blue bar to be a non stop rampaging bruce lee, then you are missing out on a good bit of the fun of the set. Teaming can many times alleviate endo issues. A few interesting things IO's can do-

Thunder kick- a lot of players feel this is one power to skip, and if you team a lot you probably would want to unless you really like the animation as it isnt needed for a chain later on. However, it is fast, and I personally love the animation of kick to face. Pro tip- if you solo, and knockback doesnt bother you, slot a stupefy chance of KB in it. i did, and love it. Kicking a guy in the face with a snap kick, and then seeing him flying backwards ragdoll over the top of his pal behind him is priceless. Crane kick a guy into a wall, and then thunderkick him in the guts as he gets up, and see him ragdoll end over end into the wall again. it really is a hoot. Cobra strike can be amusing too with this- bruce lee punch the guy in the gut and he flies backwards.

crane kick- another oft skipped power do to longer animation and some people hate the KB. I love it. Kick guys into walls, use it as a finisher- I grin every time I send a defeated ragdoll across the room. Oh, and even if you decide to skip it anyway, make an alternate build with it. Wanna know the best thing in the game? Use crane kick to finish off a devouring earth rock monster. LOL, you kick it right in the chest and it EXPLODES into rubble. Now that is a super power FINISH HIM move in a game about super powers.

I think Arcana has a good pic there of the tier 9. In the Pretty and Strong spectrum, Eagles Claw ranks up there pretty close to the top.


Really slotting wise, thats the jist of it. If you solo, I recomend embracing the KB and slotting procs and just kick guys faces in all directions. Teaming, you might want to skip those powers and procs like a lot of people do so you dont scatter spawns with every kick for your team.

I recomend a MA/regen scrapper. Non stop face kickery. Willpower if you hate regen. Invuln, dark- good if you are a pro at the recovery/endo reduction stuff, probably a bit easier to work in a team as they are a tad more stable in a fight and tend to work nicely with the reactive nature of team support.

Just thinking about Arcana's little DPA experiment there- two things jump out. First, blasters DPA would increase. This may in itself be acceptable to the devs, or at least i do not think it would put them off immediatly as they could experiment to make the advantage relative to the other AT's.

However, the other result of that little scenario would be the inherently higher DPS, brought about simply by matter of the mechanics. When you put those two things together, higher DPA and inherently higher DPS, IMO it throws a big red flag up to the devs.

Looking at what they have decided is acceptable power creep, like massive recharge reduction, high acc bonuses, relatively high recovery and plus HP, and of course the abundance of def bonuses- it stands out that there is no way to make really noticable dmg bonuses stack up. IMO, that is the one thing they have drawn the line in the sand about(well, there is certainly no abundance of +res either, but the devs have been scared of resist since I2 when they were scrambling to figure out how to stop tankers from map herding)

So, when we discuss blasters, and how they should do dmg, I think it is important to keep in mind the devs will be very reluctant to give them any kind of significant dmg increase. I think fixing snipes is probably on the table, and crashless nukes would probably be ok(provided the recharge doesnt change) but big changes to AT mods or even dmg formulas for the AT are probably out.

Well, lets see. Did Hybrid:
Give me a reason to use a crashing nuke?- nope
Make my snipe a worthwhile power?- nope
Give me enough damage to make the tradeoff of survivability worth it?-nope


I could go on, but I am just restating what others have already said.

ED wasnt for IO's really. I remembr jack posting somthing along the lines of "I never expected players to slot 6 of the same type of enhancment, and even totally ignore secondary effect enhancment" which is of course, totally rediculous for a designer to overlook.

So, in a way, ED was more about forcing players to slot like Jack wanted them to all along. i think the "yeah we have a new system coming to allow you to get some power back!!" was a knee jerk reaction to the massive rage quit exodus from the game at the time. If the devs had some ideas about the IO system, it was not like what we got, and it wasnt seen as important because CoV was on the horizon.

As for which was/is more powerful, its sort of a wash- however as a whole I would say Old school is still more potent. Some sets and combos back then were indeed major gimp, but a lot of them were powerful in ways they can not be now, like broadsword for scrappers, and the whole blaster AT. ED really smacked slower animating sets bad. The trade off back then was slower means you got more frontloaded dmg. but then the dmg got hacked, and there was no compensation for years for it. Blaster snipes are still broken. Some of the weopon sets finnally got mostly balanced out when BaBs reworked the built in redraw times from the animations. Claws got more passes for dmg balance. Energy melee got passes to normalize it, but in the process got a fun-ectomy. I still dont see the logic on the pass they gave stone melee, but it still performs well enough.

Basically, its apples and oranges yet for a lot of things. My main used to be able to fight plus 12 DE creatures in Founders falls, provided they were the rock ones that took more dmg from smashing dmg. Remember when Jose Escalante used to have monsters fall off the cliff above him and start attacking you while you were reading his mission text? I used to stand and fight- it was a lot of fun. Long battle of attrition, but I could win, and the reward was massive because of the level difference. That got "fixed" which was obviously a needed change to get the game balance under control- but it is just something we wont ever see again.

Some things were plain broken, like invincibility had a decimal place error on the def and to hit bonus it applied. Unfortunatly, the devs didnt find it until after they had totally hacked the resist numbers out of invuln. Then they found out invinc was checking and appliying the def/tohit buff 3 times a second instead of 3 times in 10 seconds(and it stacked-yeah, that was a lot of +def in a few seconds time when you were surrounded). Then they fixed that error, and left the rest of the changes in place for YEARS. In I2, without any kind of target caps or def caps in place, you could take an invuln and herd enough foes to the point you actually could not get hit. I got the little clockwork gear bagde by doing the one mission where there are little scrap piles in an office building that spawn them. I just stood there, and after a fistful of gears had spawned, I could not be hit anymore so I just waited until there were so many little clockworks in the room They were stacked up, and then through a few punches on "stacked" mobs and got the badge.

Yes, it was broken. No, we cant do that anymore, nor should we be able to. Yeah, the gap between global def redux/ED and the power creep that started when IO's got released and expanded was too big, but hindsight is 20/20. I think the game is in a much better place then it was in I2. But I also miss a few of those epic battles, one on one with a big rock monster and winning, and getting a truly massive reward for the effort. (warhulks in Creys folly were good fights too) BUT there is little I would change back. IMO the worst thing that we have from back then yet is the terribly unfun movment penalty in rooted in stone armor. But thats a pretty minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. If they fixed that, and got blasters back on track I think a legitimate argument about power levels now vs then could be had. Until then, I say the scales are still tipped to The olden days.

question: did anyone every conclusively figure out which is better on the performance shifter proc in stamina- store bought PPM or in game %chance every ten seconds?

I know some dev said eventually they want to alter everything to be PPM, but I live in the NAO so I would like to know which is better. Last I looked in the store the descriptions dont tell you the PPM rate on the SBE, so I dont even know what the rate is on them.

Good on SO's- SS/Nrg. SS doesnt need as much acc because of rage, nrg provides some rech and some endo tools. Good mix of ST and aoe, and you can focus slotting as you see fit because of fury and rage. I did a lot of rech and dmg when I had mine slotted with SO's. A lot of fun on a cheap build IMO.

Good with IO's- Stone/elec. Slap in as much rech bonus as possible, and seismic smash everythings face in. Endo tools to keep going, mitigation built into the primary to lessen the need for slotting def bonuses. Or spend billions and get both rech and def. I can not play a non-rech intensive stone melee after this brute anymore. Seismic smash every like 4 seconds really is that much fun.

Good in AE- I dunno, I dont really use AE. I hear a lot about claws/xxxx, where xxxx is a dmg aura set like dark or fire or elec. I do have a claws/elec brute, but I dont think it fits the criteria of "weak outside AE" from the OP. I played mine mostly through hero side missions, had a blast with him in croatoa gutting pumkin faces and witches. Focus on a witch that decides to try to fly away- watch the little slash fx fly through the air and chase her down, and then see it hit and do a knock back fx= priceless.

I was reading through this thread, and a lot of what is being discussed about tank mages went through my head quite some time ago, so I came up with this:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=278037

I think some of you have seen it already, but I think a few of you have had some time to stew on the blaster situation a bit more in the time between this post and that thread. While my suggestion is not really a fix for blasters themselves, it would fill a lot of holes in player's concept desires. It would also relieve pressure on the blaster AT in the sense that if a player can make a concept in this new AT, it isnt required that the blaster AT is manipulated to do it. With that, the fix for the blaster AT could be more focused on the traditional role of the blaster: do dmg, a lot, to a lot of foes, all the time. A glass cannon AT is fine so long as there is a "not glass cannon" AT to go alongside it.

Confirmed: Free item to be (1) super pack.

This will get people to use the market, AND expose them to super packs and the fun therein.

I accept your offer of: (1) super pack.


Or whatever else it is regardless. Awsome free stuff is awsome.

I agree. Clunky. Needs a rework. When I have characters concepts that would fit TP, I picture things like Fulgore from Killer instinct, a very brief animation that plants you just behind your foe so you catch them off gaurd and can land a can of whup on them.

Really, I know it is "just a travel power" but IMO all the travel powers should have attack tactics that go with them. Flying super punch, TP stealth attacks, super speed/evasive pummeling, super jump surprise ground pounding AOE, you know COMIC BOOK STUFF!!

To me, this is the biggest failing of "travel powers". While the sensation of flight is awsome of itself, its what heroes and villains in the movies and books do while flying or teleporting that makes you say "awsome". Entire comic characters were built around travel powers and attacks or other deeds, done with them.

Imagine this:

You have fly toggled on. This enables a power to use with fly. While fly is active, you can target an enemy and perform a "flying punch" that will launch you at the enemy, fist extended, and do heavy dmg. Recharge: long

or

You have TP. Target a foe, and a power is enabled. "TP attack" By clicking this power, it will "que up" with a orange circle. Clicking any one of your attack powers will then TP you to the spot directly on the other side of targeted foe, and perform the attack you selected. (yes this is sort of possible now, but the UI is dreadful and difficult to use and the long animation is killer to try to do it in combat) recharge: fast (dmg dealt mostly dependent on your normal attack powers anyway)


These kind of things are possible now with the tech they have, though there would be some effort involved to get it in game.

Once upon a time, the powers were rather good emergency buttons. Even for tanks- if someone on the team was getting piled on, and there were too many to taunt, or taunting didnt get the aggro, you could use handclap and it gave your team mate plenty of time to escape and recover or run far enough away to drop aggro. Granted this wasnt one of those things that happened all the time, bu it did happen, especially on very small teams like duo's or trio's.

Unfortunatly, back then, there were very hardcore outspoken min max players, and I mean outspoken, that would RAGE when someone used knockback and messed up there tightly grouped AOE herd. As the game has basically evolved to accomodate that type of play- the limited use for handclap has pretty much dissolved into nothing.

I would agree with others that no dmg= change it to knockdown. That is the only simple solution I see to fix it, as adding dmg would potentially overpower Super Strength by giving it two aoe powers. There are other things one could do, like make it a short wide cone attack, but that would mean a lot more work then simply changing the knockback magnitude.

My 2 cents

Put it in the super packs. Putting the T9 VIP costume stuff up for sale straight out in the market seems like a lazy cop out, and devalues the VIP part to much. At least with super packs, its still random chance meaning it takes at least a little effort or dedication(because of the risk involved for your money vs just selecting it in the market).

Ideally, IMO, there would be some in game achivement needed to unlock it, like special mission arcs with a particular badge, at which point it would get unlocked in game at the tailor. But this method removes the potential for real money transaction so I just dont see it happening.

I was reading JayBoh's thread abot orbs and already had a concept come to mind about a magician or wizard- and then thought about it and wondered if the image in my brain could be ported to other stuff.

basically, i had imagined a classic wizard with his ornate, gnarled wood staff with a glowing gem on top, shooting JayBoh's new orbs at things from the staff...... and then I thought, why not other blast sets too?

What if we had things like energy blast, electric blast, fireblast, animated as such that your character fired the projectiles from a wizard staff/techno spear or even some other item, like a set of guns(think energy blast coming out of something like the "heavy barrel" praetorian resistance guys have) or even things like wands, like the blackwand.

I mean, how cool would it be to fire electric blasts out of the end of some pointy techno spear thing, or see short circuit come out from a staff held up over your wizard's head? or bust out that big ol dust cannon and fire off some REAL beam rifle blasts(like power burst)

How much work would this take on animations? would it be basically all ground up work, or could the projectile start point of current animations just be altered to work with some of the existing things? I am not really familiar with how the animation work in this game is done. In my mind it would be as easy as taking a few of the "gun" animations for example, and then moving the projectile start point part of the animation to "fit" on the end of the gun barrel, and voila. I could be horribly mistaken though on this.

I think it would add tons of new concepts to old sets, really spice up some of the classics.

I dont see it as OP. You have some +res(emphasis on some) and a kind of aoe heal and some sort of tricky to use +regen. Those effects work well together for a team, makes incoming dmg slow down a little to allow for enough reaction time to use the heal power. Looks good to me there.

Not sure about eh -res to enemies, combined with the plus dmg in that last power to team mates. -30% res and +15% dmg is a pretty big swing there. The slow power and stun power look fine. I might consider dropping the -res to 25%.

Mostly I like it. it is a kind of animation/powerset that doesnt really exist and would fit tons of concepts, and offers a lot of powers that would be usable solo which is unlike a lot of existing sets. Thumbs up.

If you dont like it you should skip it. If it breaks immersion for you or makes you say "ug" watching it, you will have your fun level decreased, and that is a terrible thing to have happen.

IMO, I like it better then innocuous strikes, stabbing feet like 10 times is rather blah to me. besides, what would be better? Whirling staff? BARF. Now there's an animation I cant stand. I am glad they went original for this pbaoe power.

I can see how it doesnt fit some concepts though. I made up an armored giant character and gave him the laser spear or whatever its called. it looked pretty cool, but yeah the upside down spin part of that animation looked fairly out of place with that guy so I whipped up a normal size male concept instead.

maybe we can get an alternative animation for that power. After the whirling one though. it would be a red letter day if they made a new animation for whirling X.

I vote energy/fire. Both sets tend to rely on some kind of synergy from the accompanying primary/secondary of a character to excel. Energy is a keep away set that benefits from self buffs, other keep away powers, hover, etc. /fire is a pbaoe set that relys on ST dmg coming from the primary to put down bosses, and also looks to the primary to offer some kind of controls so you dont get your face smashed- even if that "control" is really fast hard hitting ST dmg.

So then we put them together. /fire offers nothing but build up for energy blast, though ring of fire is an ok attack with immob in it. energy blast does not offer any real reliable control for fire, and that control puts the foes out of the AOE of fire's attacks. hover blasting means you might as well not have a secondary. /fire reallyrelys on defense to function, a single mag one mez, for even an instant, will detoggle blazing aura and hot feet. Energy offers no ST holds, sleeps,etc to keep that mezzer at bay.

There are a fw things you can try with the pairing, like Arcana mentioned, but really nothing works well, and your attempts will feel like they maybe 50% succeeded most of the time. I have had one of these since Issue 2. He is lvl 47, and I just dont play him because the current state of blasters mechanics leaves him grasping for straws when it comes to tactics or even surviving most any situation. nothing sucks more then trying to figure out how to leverage nrg torrent, explosive blast, pbaoe toggles and fire sword circle in the middle of a fight. you can figure out how to make them sort of work at the begining of a fight, but once you are in the fray, picking one to use without compromising the others gets really irritating.



Of course, no pairing for a blaster will lack synergy if you spend enough money on rech and soft capping def. When you have plenty of time to maneuver and position because mobs cant hit you its a whole different game then trying to fight for your life on SO's. So, regardless of what you choose, your budget will determine the outcome.