Frosticus

That does nothing to explain why blazing aura can't have the same size radius as lightning field for blasters...

Great info though. Neat to look back through the fog of time and peer into the thought processes.

As an example I generally find I have little to no interest in most of the RP activities that go on in this game. As such you won't find many/any posts from me in those sections of the boards. As another example, I too have little interest in football, but you generally won't see me lurking around the sportsnet forums.

Something drew you to this discussion though and prompted you to post about how you find it uninteresting and unimpressive. If I didn't know better I'd even say you tried to belittle the activity, but your opinion doesn't matter enough to me to determine that with any degree of certainty. To me, your feigned disinterest in unimpressive.

I can assure you I'm not insulted by your position on the accomplishments that get talked about with regard to the wide variety of feats performed by people in this game. If anything I was bothered enough by some of the...lets be nice..lack of knowledge about game mechanics that you cited. That spurred me to post. The fact that I called out your hyperbole by applying it to a scenario outside of the one being talked about and you turned around and tried to pin it on me is just icing on the cake.

If you find yourself getting involved in discussions that you have no claimed interest in then I think the only way to solve that would be to not get involved in discussions you have no claimed interest in. I won't say anything to the guy that pours wine at the dinner table because I have no interest in wine. I don't partake in it and I certianly don't have the belief that I would be in a position to offer any insightful information to the situation.

Anyway, I think the OP's technical questions have been answered and I for one provided some insight into why some might pursue the activity despite the low quantitative rewards. It's the same reason why I chase IO's and high end TF's and hopefully one day down the road PvP again. It makes my toon feel more powerful and in a super hero game if I didn't feel powerful I'd leave almost immediately. Otherwise I'd shut of xp as soon as possible and never change my settings above -1/1.

Don't call me buddy, friend.

In a game about super heroes and super villains I find myself unsatisfied with being classified as lower than the named characters in the game. Much lower as it is.

In the quest to be truly super I find defeating the likes of other well recognized supers like Requiem, Infernal, Statesman, Positron, et al to be a pretty major step in achieving that goal.

Was I pretty stoked strolling in to IP the other day and seeing a creature towering over the freighter it was next to and deciding to kill it on my own? Yes. The fight is often boring as sin, but the thought of taking out the biggest and the baddest/toughest in the game means my super powered character is at least as powerful as they are.

In a game with no lasting impressions (yay we just defeated Lord Recluse and stopped his efforts to take over the world. Now lets do it again in 5 minutes) I find satisfaction in my personal quest to be extremely powerful through the few metrics that game offers.

At the end of the day I have my screens of me taking out stuff that often takes a team to tackle. I hold it in regard with my screens from particularly good Master of X runs.

I don't feel super powered plowing through countless unnamed minions/luts/bosses. that feels like a hack n' slash to me and for that I'd rather play titan's quest, left 4 dead, or even fire up some old school diablo 2. Feeling Super powered means I need to take on the biggest threats out there. More like God of War. Ya I'll hack n' slash through wave after wave, but I won't stop there, I'll take out anything you throw at me.
edit: heck even in D2 and Titan's quest you don't stop when the giant monsters show up. I mean you beat the devil himself. I don't like the thought of CoX stopping short of granting players such feats. So I do what I can to circumvent that roadblock. Some players are satisfied with killing genericboss132. I'm not.

I used to get that feeling from pvp even moreso than AV/GM hunting, but Castle took that away, so the next closest thing I can do to make me feel like I'm actually playing a super powered being is taking out AV's.

So it's worth it to me because my toons that can't do it aren't as powerful as the one's that can do it and they struggle to find activities that make them feel really powerful.

Bonesmasher tends to generate less aggro than fireball.

"Effect does not stack from same caster"

yes, but you'll never find the recipes at low level so no point even thinking about it.

It isn't a very tangibly rewarding venture. If you are looking to make inf out of it then it ranks near the bottom of activities you could be doing, probably slightly above begging in AP...

Making a build capable of dropping AVs isn't very difficult if you set out to do that. In fact more combos than not can likely achieve that benchmark. It's when you move on to killing some of the harder AV's, or doing it very quickly that things will get more difficult and you'll need to understand a lot more about the enemy and the specifics of your toon.

Whether the activity is worthwhile to you personally is something you will have to determine yourself. For instance, I've specced a couple toons into farming builds, but quickly lose interest in the activity. The money is fine, but I can make as much or more just playing around on the market. Generally with less time investment and effort. So for me, farming isn't a worthwhile activity, but it is for others. Lots of others. AV/GM killing is sort of like that, but even more niche and even less tangibly rewarding.

That said, builds that can drive over AV's like a small speed bump tend to be very strong on most TF's and TF's are a pretty popular activity on most servers. And good TF's tend to be pretty rewarding.

traps and storm.

acid mortar and freezing rain can both be stacked. Freezing rain is considerably more powerful and hits more targets much more easily.

Freezing rain is currently bugged where it rarely stacks though...PM castle about it if you want, I can't even get a read receipt on the PM's I've been sending him lately so....hopefully not an indication of how (un)well GR beta is going.

Traps brings more aoe damage, that with a solid build is very easy to use every spawn.
Storm brings more single target damage than you need to dip into the elec patron to fully utilize.
Traps has insane -regen for using against things that will live long enough where such damage differences really start to matter.
Storm has the ability to make things flee clear across the map thanks to the way mobs are responding to afraid mechanics over the last while.

IMO Traps>Storm, but if the freezing rain bug ever gets sorted out and mob ai is ever fixed my opinion might change. But for now storm is problematic and since the nerf a few issues ago to Lightning Storm is in need of some attention to give it a proper role.

clearly that power ring in the first screens is a glitch showing us the defender incarnate unlock that is coming with GR.

Great idea. sounds immensely fun and would present ever changing content because no two runs would ever been the same.

Unfortunately the dev's either hate pvp, or just have no farkin clue about the mechanics of it, sooooo.

There are several fire chains that all produce good damage. Search through a few pages back and I think Werner drew them all out somewhere.

Incin>GFS>Cremate>repeat

You need quite a bit of rech in GFS though, but the other two attacks don't need that much.

I haven't checked my MM, but I know phantasm from illusion is still rushing melee since the patch. He used to happily sit at about 40 ish feet and blast away. Now he blasts a few times and then pulls out an invisible sword that only exists in his mind, rushes into the fight and promptly dies against anything of remote difficulty.

Pro: it does ticks of of like 60 with aim/bu/slotting and some defiance going.
Pro: it kills stuff dead when paired with fireball+fireswordcircle with no repositioning needed. or sub rain of fire in for FSC for larger area of effect
Pro: it will keep you a bit safer while playing up close and personal
Pro: it encourages very aggressive play, which is the only way to go with fire/fire.

Con: it is pretty costly
Con: it turns off when mezzed
Con: some people try to use it to do silly things like get out of melee