FlyingCodeMonkey

Worthless in its current form.

Others have provided more than enough detail. I agree.

Replace the well-intended-but-misguided Defiance damage buff with some form of temporary mez protection. The worse off you are, the more important it becomes that you not be taken down by a hold or sleep. No blaster in his right mind wants to stay badly wounded for a damage buff, when the difference between wounded and dead is often a single attack. It needs to kick in a little sooner, though ... like +1 at about 60% up to about +6 at 10% ... and be effective instantaneously.

I don't recall innumerable blasters begging for more damage to solve our high-level survivability problem. Over and over and over, people beg for some form of mez protection. Not as good as the tank/scrap ATs, just something. Protection that kicks in when you're damaged is an acceptable compromise. A blaster with Defender backup (and the finally-rational 500% cap) is worth plenty of damage. It's that one huge liability, mezzing, that's leads to such rapid and brutal death against Maltas, Riktis, Carnies, etc (especially Maltas and their forever-stun grenades).

-FCM

I'm far less qualified to comment on tanking than a lot of other people here; I have exactly one tank character who's made it past the lowbie levels ... an Inv/Stone who just made 34. So realistically, my opinion doesn't count for a lot; for example, subjective statements like "this destroys any motivation I had to play an Inv into the high levels."

Then there's simple observations, like the fact that I see a lot more Fire tanks successfully herding Dreck (ugh) than Invs. Or the fact that overall, Stone offers a far more complete resistance package once you get Granite + Rooted + Minerals. Sure, you're slow and it helps to have a friendly Kinetic around ... but it's nothing a few slots in Swift doesn't fix. Getting everything you need from a small set of powers makes it easy to spare those slots.

I dunno, maybe I missed the entire spirit and point of Invulnerability? Even without the absurd target-number limits, I don't see how Invs can be expected to do their jobs with such horrible numbers on Elements, Energies, Unyielding, and even Tough Hide. I don't understand how the resists for Inv can sensibly be less than Fire and Stone. It doesn't seem to make sense logically or numerically, to say nothing of fun. Speaking as an experienced player but a relative newcomer to tanking, how are these changes rational? You don't want us to fight big groups anymore, but without big groups Invince will barely compensate for the penalty from Unyielding. Huh?

Are we supposed to drag along a friendly Sonic everywhere, now? Is this a fiendish plan to integrate the new AT flavors by making Invulnerability heavily reliant on them?

-FCM

[ QUOTE ]
There was a very difficult to track down bug in Transference and its interaction with Endurance Drain Resisting powers.

[/ QUOTE ]
Woohoo! Thanks Positron.

-FCM

[ QUOTE ]
One of the bubbles resist endurance drain.

[/ QUOTE ]
Hey, doesn't AM give endurance drain resistance now, too? It hadn't occurred to me, but maybe it's an interaction problem with other powers that give endurance-drain resistance, instead of recovery buffs.

I've noticed that receiving SB from another Kin doesn't impair Transference, and I don't think RA causes a problem either. It would make more sense if it were some sort of interaction with drain-resistance powers, though ... since drain resistance is a new thing while recovery buffs have been around since the beginning.

What do I have to do to get a red name to pop up in this discussion??

-M

[ QUOTE ]
Where I really noticed the difference was when i exemplared to 33 today. It healed maybe 1/10 of my bar when draining a +3 and only drained maybe 1/2 their bar. I am 100% sure this is broken.

[/ QUOTE ]
Had you at any point since logging on been affected by a recovery buff (AM, RA, AB) from another character? That seems to be the pattern. Being recovery-buffed by another person breaks your Transference for some reason.

-FCM

[ QUOTE ]
Ask in your zone if you can get an AM buff.. then try it on even cons.. end recovery is almost non-existant. Just finished trying it on -15s in Talos with an AM buff.. I went from 5 END to 29 or so.. and that's with 2 green End Recovery SOs

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes! I was thinking the same thing in my post just now. Earlier this evening my rad teammate was along using AM on us, and my Trans stopped working correctly until I returned to the game later. Last night it was our empath teammate with RA and AB. It seems to be related to having recovery buffs from other teammates, and it lingers.

-M

So here's the thing ... it's not consistent.

Earlier today it was working fine. I have a witness to my getting back nearly all of my blue bar from a red minion. I tried later on a few solos and it was working great on +0s, +1s, +2s, etc. This is un-enhanced.

So I get together this evening with my sg and we run a mission ... and it's broken again. I have several reliable witnesses who can attest that I got maybe 15-20% from any mob I zapped. Those were DE mobs, so we were thinking hmm, maybe that was related to it somehow. We went to Founder's and conduct some experiments with the same groups of Council on whom Transference was working for me earlier and no ... still broken. We tried mobs with full end, empty end, of various cons, with me on team, with me solo, no difference. So I know it's not just a faction thing or team size.

Then we go into an outdoor mission with CoT, and suddenly Trans is working great again! Everything's cool.

The only thing that even remotely resembles a pattern that I'm seeing right now is that every time it stops working, I have in the not-too-distant past been under the influence of recovery buffs other than my own ... RA and AB from an empath teammate, AM from a rad teammate, and so on. I zoned into the CoT mish after having relogged; maybe that cleared the slate somehow, I don't know, but I'm still working on it. Right now we're doing an indoor Council mish and all is well.

-FCM

Hmm ... that's a very interesting question. As you say, powers that resist drain shouldn't affect recovery, but it's still something I hadn't considered.

Looking through the list (Murky Cloud, Rooted, O2 Boost, AM, Insulation Field, are there more?) I don't see much for obvious possibilities. As I recall we fought mostly Nemesis, CoT, and some Freaks, but I didn't really notice the problem until we were fighting the CoT. I tried Trans on demons, earth thorns, fire thorns, bosses, minions, reds, purples, and everything seemed to return close to the same weak amount.

However, the mobs I tested on today were Council. I'll have to keep an eye on Trans versus different mob factions.

-FCM

Well, if that doesn't beat all.

Today, I can't repro it. I finally got a chance to log on and try out Transference again on a few targets from +0 up to +3, and it's working fine. Absolutely nothing unusual; exactly how it was a couple of days ago, and vastly better than last night.

I didn't imagine the problem, though.

Unfortunately, there's no way I can enumerate all of the player and villain buffs and effects my character was subjected to last night during play. At this point, it has to be some sort of interaction; ie., buff A wears off at precisely the moment I cast Transference or buff B or whatever. Which means that I'll probably see it again sometime, but the repro will be much more difficult. For now I'm just happy that it's working again, and for now I'll just have to live with the fact that you all think I'm crazy.

-M

[ QUOTE ]
As a side note/follow up question.....I do not have Siphon Speed...Are you seeing some signifcant improvement by using that power and do you have hasten as well.

[/ QUOTE ]
Yes. The new Siphon Speed is very good. As far as I can tell, it seems to add another 33%-or-so to the 66%-or-so that I get from Hasten, and so my recharge times are incredible now. It's like being able to Speed Boost yourself, in terms of recharge buff and movement buff. I love it. Add a teammate with AM and ... wow.

It's weird to me that you guys aren't (?) seeing the same dramatic difference in Transference that I'm seeing. Having gotten it fairly recently and having put my 27/29/31 slots in other things (more speed boost, more short circuit, more tactics, etc etc) I actually do not have Transference slotted at all yet ... so this is a baseline comparison for me. My one enhancement slot is filled with Accuracy. For me it's literally the difference between getting back 85-90% of my endurance one day and only 10-15% or so the next under identical circumstances. No new slots, no variation in enhancements. The only obvious difference is that I'm Siphon-Speeding myself a lot more now.

As I may have mentioned (have in some places, not in others) it's like Trans picked up a brutal dependency on con level that wasn't so pronounced before. I got back about 55-60% from a -22 grey in Perez Park, whereas the previous day I could recover at least 85% from +3 red minions on our team missions. Let me ask this ... about how much blue, without any enhancement, are you guys used to recovering from Transference on even-con minions? I wonder because for me, Trans has gone from a Very Good Power to barely mediocre. I had planned to slot it for additional drain on higher-con bosses, but now if I were to slot it fully for recovery I probably wouldn't even get it close to where it was before.

Among the things I like about the Kinetics primary is that many of the powers don't require heavy slotting to be useful. More is always more of course, but it's generally true of Siphon Power, Siphon Speed, Fulcrum Shift, ID, IR, and so on. So it was with Transference previously, but not now. My regular teammates can attest to the difference, too.

Perplexed,
M

I suspect you're right, and that somehow the reduction to Drain in PvP has unintentionally affected the Recovery in PvE.

Humorously, I didn't notice any major reduction to the drain aspect of Transference in PvE; only the massive hit on Recovery.

-M

Done, and done. Here's hoping.

Hellooo, any red names out there? Power broken in Issue 4, please say something ...?

As an experiment, I took my level 32 Kin defender to Perez Park, used up my endurance bar, and then zapped a level 10 Skull with Transference. From that, I got back a little more than half my blue bar. This from a -22 grey mob. Now, scale that up to orange or red 34s and 35s ... and you can imagine how little return I'm getting from Trans on my team missions, heh. Transference is one of the really good powers in the kin def set, devs.

With it broken like this, I'm nothing but a speed-boost dispenser when on big teams. SB only lasts a couple of minutes, and boosting 6 or 7 people takes a big chunk of my own blue, so with Transference broken my routine gets reduced to SBing people and spamming Transfusion heals so that I won't be out of endurance when it comes time to refresh another 6 or 7 SBs for the next fight. I can't really use my attacks or other cool stuff nearly as much and afford to keep everyone buffed. SB is awesome, but even with four green recovery SOs there are characters whose endurance use can stay ahead of it. I need Transference to keep them going; endurance recovery is possibly my most vital and signature function as a kin. Pleeeease fix this quickly.

I4 has been bittersweet. The new Siphon Speed is sooo good. The improved endurance drain is sooo nice. Transference is sooo broken.

-M

I'm not imagining it. The recovery from trans is WAY less effective today on the mobs of the same con I was using it on yesterday. :\

I looked at the Recent Updates list and didn't see anything about Transference. Was this a ninja nerf?

-FCM

I'm loving the new Speed Boost, but I swear Transference (Defender version) took a HUGE hit when Issue 4 went live. Am I imagining things?

Thanks,
FCM

I've played heroes with all four of the major travel powers, extensively, singly and in combinations (not claiming to be special, just qualifying).

SS+SJ is probably best overall. It's an awesome combo of horizontal-vertical motion, mid-air control, and sheer speed.

That being said, Fly is still my favorite travel power. No other power is as versatile indoors or out. In some places, like the catwalk room of the hydra trial, there's simply no better travel power than Fly. For my bubble defender, hovering right over the group is an ideal position.

Nevertheless, Fly should have a higher maximum speed. By the time you can afford to invest that many SO slots in Fly, no Speeder really cares if your maximum flight speed is plenty fast. Typically, we'd just as soon not have to wait for you to arrive, assuming no recaller. Besides, as has been observed, the Speed pool includes Hasten, so Speeders don't have to lose one of their four pools for that. Speed also has the Stealth component and no accuracy penalty, so there are plenty of good reasons to take Speed even if Fly were competitively fast in the high ranks.

Teleport is definitely the weakest travel power. The micro is intensive. It's endurance-hungry. It's lag-susceptible. The pool still tops out with the worthless Teleport Group instead of the Teleport to Waypoint power most sensible heroes (but no devs, apparently) would rather have. By the time you reach the 30s and 40s, the Teleport speed advantage is negligible or absent. It's a tolerable evil if you want to have Recall available, and it does allow Shard travel, and it does allow Immobilized movement (much less meaningful in the age of Unyielding). However, just as Fly could use about another SO's worth of speed, Teleport needs a bit of fine-tuning. The "flexing" activation animation should be removed so that travel is immediate, and the forced hover should be cancel-able by directional movement. Then Teleport would be worthy of its endurance cost.

Extensive traveler of PC,
FCM

[ QUOTE ]
Plus, we'll put in a difficulty slider (can't promise a time yet or else my producer will kill me).

[/ QUOTE ]
Woohoo! I really can't over-state the importance of this one feature. So many perceived problems will fade into history.

Not sure why a slider would be necessary, unless you want to make mission difficulty more dynamic than it needs to be ... I always preferred the idea of a one-time selection of difficulty when you receive a mission. The more elaborate slider version promises finer control, but would undoubtedly take longer to implement.

But hey, right now just knowing it's on the horizon somewhere is great news. Everything else is just implementation details.

-FCM

First thing I did upon logging on was trip over a Rularuu expedition in Talos and help smash their portal, too. Very cool.

At least I'm not the only one missing work because of this ... lol, it's been a lonnnnnnng lunch for me today. Cryptic, guys, please ... could the big invasion event (whatever it is) possibly occur over the weekend sometime?

Otherwise I'll probably miss it, and of course ... the world revolves around me. I think?

-FCM

[ QUOTE ]
2. As a touch typist, I’ve moved all my movement keys to the right by one key (WER,SDF in place of QWE, ASD) to allow using my ‘primary’ fingers in a normal ‘home-key’ position.

[/ QUOTE ]
Hallelujah, I'm not the only one! Sorry, not adding much to the discussion.

We got victimized by an ugly one. We were doing Synapse's TF mission to kill the Clockwork King, and we were on about the 8th mission. Long, fun fights for great xp. The group reassembled yesterday to finish out the missions. We knew there were TF bugs and that we might not get the mission reward, but we weren't prepared for this ...

About 90% of the way through the first of the three warehouses, our leader dropped connection and we were all kicked out to the Steel Canyon street. (!) We re-entered the warehouse (as and our ex-leader returned), and found it stocked with clocks for about one hero ... not six. When we finished the mission ... it was over, as if it had been a regular mission instead of a TF series. No 2nd/3rd warehouse. No Clockwork King.

Now Synapse won't talk to us, because he thinks we're done, even though we didn't fill up his confidence bar and we didn't find the CW King. All he'll do is thank us for our help.

All I want is for my contact with Synapse to be reset so that I can restart that TF mission series with another group at a later time. I hope that can be arranged. The xp was so great, that I don't really mind having to go back for a second attempt.

-FCM