Flux_Vector

Quickly replying since there were questions in the previous post...

1 - Do I expect to solo AVs? Yes. And I have. Repeatedly. With my NW and Fort builds both; my NW build just doesn't need any incarnate powers or insps to (they do make it a lot faster, though). I've also soloed AVs with my brute, my defender, and my MM. It's not really hard to actually, in most cases it's just a little time-consuming (and it's not even time consuming for the defender or MM, or now that she's got a very rare reactive interface, the NW).

2 - If you burned through all your insps and had to hit-and-run on an EB as almost any character at 50, especially an IO'd VEAT, you're probably doing it wrong somehow*. * - a very few EBs are 'special' (Biff comes to mind). Your insp tray by itself is more than sufficient to beat the majority of EBs from a cold start.

Also, a non-veat related bit of market advice: orange and yellow recipes aren't good uses of merits. Good uses of merits at this moment are Kinetic Combat recipes or random rolls in the 30-34 or 25-29 level ranges. Whichever you feel happier with. I like rolling at the moment, because it forces you to stay diversified - it'd suck to have 5 KC's up for 200m each, then have the bottom fall out of their market (though really, thanks to the game's current overall state I don't see the market for KC dropping without a nerf to it, or to defense). If the price difference between a recipe and the crafted IO is more than 4 million inf, craft it before selling.

Actually, I think you're missing my point, and also don't understand DPS or control in this game, but I'm not really arguing with you or your playstyle, I'm sharing my observations from extensive play and actual empirical testing, and trying to clear things up because people seem to be misunderstanding me on something fundamental here:

I'm saying that melee fort and NW single-target DPS are very close. The NW advantage there is small. That in my opinion ST DPS is NOT a reason to pick NW over fort, especially at higher tiers of build.

In short I basically agree with you: the reason to go fort vs NW in endgame-tier builds is for different tools!

However I also feel the need to emphasize that Redraw is a tested and proven DPS destroyer for widows, it took what I thought would be up to a 20% dps gain from going from FU-lunge-strike-swipe to FU-lunge-strike-gloom and turned it into about a 5% dps LOSS in practice. Considering the DPA difference between gloom and swipe, that implies redraw's actually got a hugely negative effect on your damage output. And the fort psi attacks all have lower DPA than gloom, so they'll be bringing you into an even bigger damage loss.

Also crits for widows aren't a significant DPS increase (placate with its about 2.5s of animation is DPS-neutral with simply attacking again instead), so if in fact you're waiting to re-hide for longer than 2 seconds or so, you're probably actually losing DPS.

And control is certainly quantifiable, it just compares to survivability rather than to damage output. If you want to quantify it in a cheap and easy manner you'd come up with a method of estimating how many attacks it stops you from taking over X amount of time, and compare it to how much damage your regular mitigation would have defeated in that same time. Say for example estimating your control's "uptime" by comparing its purplepatch-resisted duration with its recycle time and tohit rate, and factoring in the time things spend not attacking you as 'lost' time in their DPS towards you. It's not as simple to determine as DPS, but it's certainly doable.

What I did say is that I find the burst survivability my NW can run is better in the incarnate trials - I don't find control very useful there because the trials are heavily stacked with bosses that hit very hard individually and that you can't land enough AOE control on by yourself to overcome their protections. And yeah, you can make a fort with aidself... but I think you'd be giving up some of those fun tools that are the reason to be one, then.

You still can do very well either way. I'm not sure why anyone's taking my posts so seemingly personally when I've been saying that all along, with numbers and other evidence.

Well my point all along has been that the DPS is close but the reason to go fort over NW is the bag of tricks, while the reason to go NW over fort is that you're statistically stronger with a less-expensive build. I've played NW and ranged fort extensively, and melee fort moderately, myself. My opinions and advice are based on experience that have some numbers and a few controlled test results to back it up.

For example at least on my builds, the melee fort attack chain took down a pylon in 8 minutes with no incarnate powers (for about 208 DPS); the NW attack chain took it down in about 6:45 (for about 223 DPS). So there's about a 15 DPS difference in my testing on a high-recharge build, before incarnate powers apply. In practice, I think the major 'real' ST combat advantages for NWs at high build levels are that target switching and movement is going to favor Slash because your attack chain will reset more often than it runs through a complete cycle, and that Slash is a better 'oneshot something out of hide' power - but in terms of raw DPS a slash crit isn't better than any other crit and placate is damage-neutral, so that second bit is more of a 'tactical assassination' power (say, to nail sappers with) and not something that's going to really matter vs hard targets.

Forts get other methods for dealing with targets like Sappers, so I consider that 'NWs are better nasty target assassins' thing a wash.

At lower build levels/less recharge the NW (such as on SOs) the NW is going to see a bigger advantage from having Slash as part of their regular attack chain.

I personally badly felt the difference between ranged and melee performance when I was playing ranged fort as one build and melee NW as the other. The ranged fort's better AOE - and she had psy scream, psy tornado, psy wail and dark obliteration - didn't really impress me that much in play because tornado and scream are so slow I only got to throw down a full cycle if I was with a weak team. This was pre-judgement, too: teaming with a fire corr or archer or assault rifle or crab spider pretty much made my AOE contribution redundant. I was ranged fort first, actually; this experience with my psy tornado swirling in around a corpse (because someone else had already killed it) or missing a bunch of the spawn because its target moved before it finished animating and travelling was the reason I made an NW dual build when that was released. I was also very unhappy with my ranged fort's ST damage using dominate, subdue, TK blast, and gloom. It might be good for bosses/EBs/AVs after they pop unstoppable but it makes getting them to pop it in the first place a bit slower and less sure.

Plus I wasn't using followup, since I was all-ranged, so my damage was suffering more in comparison. And if you're going to use FU, you're closing in to melee, and would have to lose time backing off to fire your ranged cones. At which point I was happier using spin than any of the other AOEs and staying in melee to keep FU stacked.

That all said, I guess it wasn't clear what I mean about claws vs ranged - I'm not saying only take one set of powers, I'm saying 'minimize your redraw' and especially try to avoid having an attack chain that requires redraw either way. The 'hybrid' attack chain that's part ranged and part melee generally has the drawbacks of both and then some. You still have to close in for attacks, your attack chain being slower hurts followup stacking, and your redraw hurts your performance both ways. Really the key here is FU in my opinion and experience. If you keep it stacked it's a 60% damage buff but you're not going to get constant stacking from it if you're playing with a mostly-ranged or hybrid chain.

I don't generally have all the trouble a lot of people are claiming in terms of getting into melee, myself - combat jumping is gold, or maybe I'm just well practiced at it. Having subdue and dominate in my fort build can be convenient, but I'd be able to live without them just fine. And don't forget if you just want to shoot runners in the back that NWs can get a couple ranged shots too; you can even take mental blast if you're very worried about unstoppable. In terms of damage resistance, using an older damage resistance spreadsheet with about 1600 enemy resistances listed, I came up with the following average resistances across enemies by damage type:

Smashing: 9%; Lethal: 11%; Fire: 6%; Cold: 7%; Energy: 6%; Negative: 6%; Psy: 8%; Toxic: 10%. So lethal is more resisted... but by less than most people tend to think. And Psy resistance is almost as bad as smashing resistance, which is something a lot of people call a drawback to smashing sets. I still conclude that the claws approach for widows wins out decisively thanks to followup and better attack stats, even accounting for resistance.

In overall build terms, at the end of the day I'm finding my NW build being more focused on being a 'good pure melee' is helping it in survivability more than offensive output. Total dom and aura of confusion are nice against spawns... spawns that being softcapped already make a non-threat. Against high damage spikes (like from critting victoria-mkivs) and AVs/GMs, barrier and aid self are just solid gold. But this is my experience-based opinion from having tried it both ways: I'd rather have extra burst survivability than area control in the most modern content (aka, incarnate trials).

As for judgement rolling, my friends and I usually get into a groove where we pretty well synch judgements (and sometimes destinies) by default, because after we take turns the first few spawns we're all on staggered cooldowns and each using their judgement off cooldown is good enough to keep it staggered.

Actually, attack chain testing showed me that a melee fort is very competitive with a night widow for single-target damage output. With a reactive interface incarnate power the gap actually seemed to close between them, too.

I tend to call a build that falls in between 500m and 1b inf in IOs as 'expensive' on the forums, the way the one posted a up-stream probably would Granted, I'm one of those players who has billions of inf and has purpled out builds I never even play anymore now, and so it's fairly cheap to me, but I am still in touch with the common man. He brings me my tea and serves as my footrest after I polish my monocle on his tie

That build is, by the by, IMO full of flaws but it isn't really being presented for critique here so I'm not going to. I will however advise a reader either to go all-ranged or all-claw and not to mix them. Extensive pylon testing showed me that redrawing your claws during your attack chain will hurt your DPS, and fort psi attacks put the claws away. So, claws in or claws out, but don't mix 'em.

The AOE advantage forts have is actually hard for me to quantify. In practice I think psychic wail is a much bigger boon than psionic tornado; the strongest non-nuke AOEs in the widow AT are available to both the NW and the Fort - spin and dart burst. Psionic tornado's slow cast speed and travel delay (the power doesn't take effect immediately, it travels and then takes effect after a delay, like subdue) badly hurt its practical performance whenever I've tried to use it. The knockup is great and if you use it as a PBAOE you can minimize its speed issues, though. Psychic scream, sadly, has pretty awful stats for both NWs and Forts. I'd give serious thought to grabbing a patron pool AOE instead of scream, at least.

And Incarnate powers open a whole new bag of worms for the discussion; I've found that my NW build benefits a lot more from having Aidself in it because that lets me run a Barrier Destiny and thus improve my survivability even further, especially against incarnate-tier content. My fort build didn't have room for aidself and suffers, relatively speaking, by having to use a Rebirth regen Destiny instead. Judgements are also deprecating the value of being an 'aoe character' in my experience. High end teams can average a judgement every 11.25 seconds, meaning that on a team of 8 who all had judgements and coordinated 2 judgements per spawn, you'd have to clear survivors and travel to the next spawn in under 25 seconds each to ever run out of Judgement throughput. And if your team needs more AOE than two judgements per spawn, I hope they're herding AVs or something.

Considering how the pvp zones are generally devoid of actual pvp, and most of the arena action seems to be on test, I think you'd be waiting a pretty long time to get some of the badges without organizing something somehow.

Snow Globe: You are the one arguing that the game has the right to just shove players into other peoples' leagues and that those people are jerks for doing something about it and shouldn't have the right to do anything about it.

You're arguing that people shouldn't have a choice, a fundamental choice that MMORPG players expect because every other major western MMORPG nigh-universally gives them that choice, including COH for the last 7 years of its operation. That choice is the choice of who they team with.

Yes, there are devices in some MMOs where you can be matched with teammates at random, but those are fully optional to actually experiencing that content. If you want to queue for a random team to do a dungeon in another game, you can. If you don't, though, you can walk to the dungeon and step in anyway. With less than a full team or raid, if you so choose. With only the people you wish to, if you so choose.

That second part is what's missing from the trials. There's no option but to use the random team finder. It's not good for anybody for players not to have that option in the incarnate trials. And even those other games that do have random team finders, give teams the right to kick others off for whatever reason.

I think the only people who'd be in favor of open-world zone events as raid content... never played Everquest 1.

There are s few things I think a lot of people are either missing or downplaying.

First - just because premades can and might lock themselves, even assuming most or all premades do so, there will be numerous individuals in the LFG system by themselves or in smaller teams that don't meet the minimum trial requirements. The system will then serve its purpose by grouping these people together for a trial. They won't be excluded from getting to do trials at all. To imply, or outright state, that they will is ludicrous. Might there be a wait? Yes, probably. Is that the end of the world? Is there some overriding reason that everyone must be placed into a trial asap even at the risk of their being kicked for being put on a league that doesn't want them?

Second - if negative player behavior in groups is a driving concern for opposition against locked leagues, isn't negative behavior by individuals more common? And wouldn't it make more sense to support being able to strictly control who you league with from the outset if you were worried about people behaving badly? After all if someone is out to 'grief' or damage your trial performance there are lots of ways they can do that without its necessarily being noticed, up to and including causing you to outright fail. If you're going to assume people are jerks by default, don't you also have to assume that the random LFGer who's put on a premade is going to be a jerk too? And even if you don't, why are you wanting to put an innocent LFGer onto a premade of people who you do assume are jerks? But really, why are people who want to lock their leagues assumed to be guilty in this argument, and the people who are queuing for randoms assumed to be innocent?

Third - What the devs intend is only being extrapolated from the system's design here, but even if it isn't, that doesn't mean their intentions are the right thing. In fact if their intention is setting it up so people can't control who they team with other than by using the kick button, it's an outright stupid intention because it runs contrary to customer expectations and hands a Quality of Life feature advantage right over to their competitors without even trying. The developers are neither an arbiter of morality nor are their implementations perfect and infallible.

At the end of the day, leagues are in their infancy. They have a lot of room for improvement in the richness and functionality of their management tools overall; a locking feature is just one of many things I think they need to stand toe to toe with their competitors's raid management systems in the MMORPG marketplace. But it's an important one, because 'not being grouped with other people at random against their will' is a fundamental expectation of MMORPG players set and reinforced by nearly 20 years of precedent in the marketplace.

At this point I'm just wondering if some people on these forums hate other peoples' freedoms or something. Or are so firmly pro-developer that anything the developers shovel into the game is considered gold, even if it's crap.

People want choices. Burger King's marketing slogan isn't "take what we give you and if you don't like it, go to McDonald's," it's "have it your way" - for a reason. They want your business! Trying to take away choices is bad business, for any business. It's worse when those are choices that people fundamentally expect to have, such as the choice of who they team with in an MMORPG.

Whatever socially stunted psychoses are driving people to try and claim that we should be giving up expected, fundamental choices and rights for the LFG tool still don't change the fact that its current design is simply bad business and can only hurt Paragon Studios' bottom line and word of mouth in the marketplace - and that second part is, from all I can tell, a huge factor in determining which MMOs get whose money.

Edit - combined with the absolute disaster of a trial rewards system, this is a good way to lose lots of people to other popular MMORPGs with strong endgame raiding content, sane and transparent rewards paradigms, and oh yeah, the ability to control who you group with all the time, every time.

My NW's always dealt with lack of DDR with purple insps.

And with i19's inherent fitness, I grabbed elude and haven't died from cascade failure since.

And Fortunatas could just pop off an AOE control if they were getting debuffed instead.

Plus, since my NW has aidself, I use the barrier destiny for more debuff padding and added resistance.

However, widows do get some DDR and some scaling resists, from Foresight. It's just not enough to really make a huuuuge difference like it does for SR. It's still there, and it does on occasion help.

I actually came up with a great analogy here.

Think of the trials as a restaurant. It's a public business that puts people at various tables inside it, and serves food to them. Everyone who goes into the restaurant has the right to get the same quality food, from the same kitchen, at the same price, with the same service. Ie, everyone has the right to do the same trial, with the same NPCs, and the same rewards and advancement. It's a series of semi-private spaces (tables) inside a larger public space (the restaurant). A hostess seats people or groups or people at various tables in the restaurant; that would be the LFG tool.

But this restaurant has some strange rules - its tables only come in certain sizes and need to have a minimum number of people at them before you can get your meal, but if you come with that many people you will get served immediately. If you don't, the hostess groups people together to meet the minimum number for service. But one of the other rules is that the person who reserved the table can remove anyone from it, at any time, for any reasons. The problem with all of this is that the hostess never knows ahead of time who minds having someone being sat with them, and who doesn't. And since it's disruptive and adds to someone's wait time to get a table if they're removed, it's not really good for any of the customers - either the table's original occupants, or the one who was innocently seated there by the ignorant hostess.

I don't think people have the right to sit at other peoples' tables if they're unwanted. If they are, the person whose table that is, is in my opinion perfectly within their rights to remove them from that table, forcing the hostess to ask to seat them elsewhere, including waiting for another table to open. They aren't always going to choose to exercise their rights, but that doesn't mean they don't have those rights.

The problem of people being seated where they aren't wanted would easily, smoothly, and invisibly be solved, if only the hostess could be told ahead of time who was or wasn't open to strangers being sat at their tables. And everyone would always have an enjoyable meal with the minimum amount of waiting as a result.

And as noted, on different visits to the restaurant, the same people might be open to guests sometimes, and not others. Just like they already sometimes have guests reseated, and sometimes don't. It wouldn't create an exclusive or hostile environment anymore than the current situation where someone is disruptively removed does, it would probably be a lot cleaner and smoother.

And that'd be better for the restaurant's business cause really, who wants to eat alot at a restaurant with their friends, when strangers at seated with you without your consent and then you have to ask the hostess to remove them (and get called a jerk by perfect strangers who seem to reject your human rights of privacy and freedom of association), rather than just telling them you want a private table?

Edit: Oh, and yes, privacy and freedom to choose with whom one associates? Basic, fundamental human rights that everyone ought to enjoy.

I agree it's uncommon now, but partly because a lot of people haven't heard that this is intended behavior from the system. I think premades' tolerance of outsiders will drop as word spreads (and if the sextuple-secret probation rewards system for the trials stays, I think tolerance for outsiders will drop from that, too).

I think a lot more people would be advocating to have a 'league lock' feature implemented if they didn't already think one was coming, or realized that the lack of it and possibly also the 'league star jumble' when you start weren't bugs but rather working as intended.

In general I think leagues need more robust all-around management tools. In addition to being able to lock themselves from mid-stream or unwanted joining, leagues ought to have a 'vote for new leader' feature, for example, in case someone gets the star in a jumble and won't give it up to the person who formed the premade, or if a fully-random league ends up with an abusive or incompetent leader with delusions of grandeur. A vote to kick feature is probably a little much, but it might also be useful, in the event that a league leader who's otherwise competent is sheltering someone who's behaving dysfunctionally, or if the leader isn't willing to kick people themselves - a lot of leaders, as some have noted, are very kick-averse even when they shouldn't be.

And I agree with the other side in this argument: the people using the LFG tool to find a league deserve not to end up being kicked and having to re-enqueue and waste their time. Just, the only way this is accomplished by not putting them on premades that would lock themselves if they could...

Actually, I thought it was rather nice of the leader to explain him or her self in the first place.

I haven't looked at claws/SR, but on paper without the reactive interface I've looked at several variants to my widow build that hits various points around 250 DPS while using the cardiac alpha. An ingame pylon test I did showed me I could hit between 250 and 300 actual DPS with the reactive interface under true game conditions. No lore pets were involved. If that's not more damage than scrapper claws, and it very well might not be, I'd still expect it to be pretty competitive.

I also expect widows to have an easier time hitting the 'incarnate softcap' by themselves, if you want to, and they do bring team buff into the equation, along with having some very nice tricks. SR really doesn't compare well to the 'widow training' branches, needing more powers to yield less defense, with the major advantage being its high DDR. I think if there's a place the widows badly outshines the scrapper, it's in the comparative secondaries.

At this point I think Hyperstrike is intentionally setting out to get the thread locked.

Which is sad on so many levels.