Frostweaver

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The 4th option is that energy aura for scrappers and tankers can be different from the brute's version. Actually, fire melee gets a similar treatment. As mentioned before, this might make the brutes mad.

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Interesting how all 3 ATs with Fiery Melee have different sets. The Brute/Scrapper ones are the closest, but not the same.

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what's the difference besides the ordering?

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I wouldn't term Carey and Hamilton erotica, although they certainly include elements of it in their stories. I'd classify them both as mainstream fiction. I haven't read the others, so can't comment, but I was referring specifically to fiction that was shelved in the Erotica section.

My point remains, though: Don't expect the masses to love your serious work.

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I would term everything Hamilton wrote after Obsidian Butterfly as erotica. And the quality went downhill along with the subject matter.

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I agree. The worst was that farce of a book about whatsisname... Anita's Selkie boyfriend.

I have never before felt cheated when I bought a book, but that book alone made me feel utterly cheated. like she started a story, threw in some porn, and then ended it with a deus ex machina.

Laurell should have been slapped for that garbage. Her editor should have given it back to her and told her to do it over again, and this time add a story.

I honestly wanted my money back. I never even felt that way about 'battlefield earth' and that was a horrible movie.

I actually greatly enjoyed the 'rikti invasion' arc.

technically it was a set of farm missions, and obviously the first mission was an outdoor invasion, with lots of rikti comm officers... but there was a TON of dialogue, and a bunch of captured heroes as well as optional bodybags of those who fell to the rikti ships.

the rest of the chain was interesting to say the least, culminating in a 'boss farm' which near mimicked a rikti invasion. there was even a highly interesting storyline about the characters taking the fight to the enemy, and if (admittedly) arachnos base maps and tech maps were used to simulate the interior of the rikti mother ship, at least it was understood as to why.


I hope more 'farmable' arcs of this type are published... farming should be fun, and I could see an entire series of spin-off mission chains detailing the entire rikti invasion from the initial landing to the creation of the war walls to the fighting in the sewers and the sealing of Orenbaga.

umm...was that a spoiler?

You did it wrong

the farming mission you need to choose has a level 45 av or eb in it, that goes from 45-50. You do it with level 50 dolls and have a REALLY fast level 50 burner (There are very few builds that qualify). Just hit the main concentrations and the massed ambushes, if you miss a few go on to the next group, don't screw around with singles or doubles or any mobs less than about 10 at a time.
That will get you from level 1 to level 46 in a little over 35 minutes (Conceivably faster if you can find a faster burner) and then you have about 25 minutes to get from 46-50 via standard level 54 doll missions or keep doing that one... the problem is that that single mission slows down dramatically after level 46, 49-50 alone took almost an hour.

See, we need a new law to match Godwin's law.

any argument which winds up quoting, in whole or in part, wikipedia's 'logical fallacies' page or any page of a similar nature in a different resource is automatically lost by the poster quoting said resource.

It is alright to mention that something is an 'ad hominem' or 'moving the goalposts' argument, but defining it bespeaks an arrogance that proves that the arguer has nothing really to say about the argument itself, and is simply attempting to wave their 'intellectual superiority' e-peen.

ahh, shadowjack beat me to it

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If that's the best you monkeys can come up with, you're boring the hell out of me.

All you've done is convinced me that a) I'm more mature than you are and b) I'm a damned sight smarter than you are.

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Ad Hominem Argument
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the person", "argument against the person") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the source making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim.

The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject.

Try adding some standard NPC's to the mix, their size is trivial, and they can add a lot to a mission.

I thought Fury Claws were defaulted to black? Not-modifiable, I mean.

I would like to point out that a lot of erotica is better than a lot of 'excellent, serious fiction.' and claiming that it is low-brow mass appeal may be a bit of a misnomer, if not outright biased.

examples:
Kushiel's series by Jacqueline Carey
The Taming of sleeping beauty by Anne Rice
Firefly by Piers Anthony (Not the best example, I am afraid)
The Anita Blake Series and the Meredith Gentry Series by Laurell k. Hamilton
About half of all modern supernatural and vampire writers.

Be careful of what you are calling low-brow.

for example, 'Twilight' was made into a movie... now THAT was a perfect example of mainstream garbage, erotica not included.

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The folks on Test didn't want to grief anyone, they wanted to see what the badges were, and so on and so forth. I think the numbers were different as well. There may have BEEN folks on Test who knew this... but preferred to not let it get out, so that once the code was Live it'd take a lot of effort and time to get it changed, and therefore they'd have months to mess with people.

I'd love for the Devs to datamine the votes that knock something out of HoF, see how many are the same people doing the same thing to other arcs.

And then ban a few folks from the AE (or the game) for at least a few months, if not permanently. There's no other way to deal with griefers, really.

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two things:

1) you know, there are folks that say we never landed on the moon. Conspiracy theories are funny as hell.

2) I thought the footsteps inititiative sucked. There's a long list of reasons, starting with the NPC's taking most of your experience and ending with the total lack of any sort of challenge. The story was alright, but it was definitely NOT Mark Twain... at best I thought the story rated a 3.

Does that mean that I should be banned from the MA simply because I do not enjoy a story that many others do? I hated 'Wizard's first rule' also, I thought it was trite and overdone, showing too much influence from other writers with a classically pathetic 'I am your father, Luke.' ending, and yet, that book was so popular it was turned into a TV series. Does that mean I should not be allowed to read books or watch TV? Simply because, as a writer, I have higher literary standards than my peers?

No. No, and no. Bad Idea.

not till you get talsorian claws that you can shade to look like ice armor :P

ice brutes would be a heck of a lot more redside tankers than stone brutes are :P

caltrops.

It doesn't matter what you take in devices as long as you take caltrops. same for traps.

You know, I have played a huntsman build. A lot. and I can say with utter certainty that a huntsman build is a crippled beastie. Sure it plays in the ranged ballpark, but it skips a lot of the tricks thgat make a bane such an amazing solo toon.

I understand that on paper it looks like banes have some issues. or at least compared to other archetypes 'on paper', but hyperbole or not, my personal experiences with banes have had them FAR more capable of standing toe-to-toe than most night widows, quite a few scrappers, and most stalkers.

I don't know whether it is because of the debuffs in bane's atttacks, the unremitting knockback adding mad survival value, or simply the ease of slotting IO sets into bane abilities, but for whatever reason, on my side-by-side AE kill all speed trials against multiple types of opponents, the bane has consistently pulled ahead. Ironically, the only type of mob that the bane did NOT pull ahead was the melee-only scrapper hordes.

My thought is that this actually cripples one of the primary functions of CP, and that is minimizing your endurance expenditures while recovering from OL's crash.
truthfully, that's pretty much the only thing I use it for, since ED easily handles any other endurance issues the set might have.

It is not a bad idea, though, I just think it wouldn't be what is needed.

That's one of the reasons that energy assault is often paired with gravity.

Until wormhole, gravity often does NOT provide enough mitigation from it's primary. Energy assault helps this. energy does not provide enough damage, gravity, on the other hand does.

Admittedly, the total is slower than molasses, but it's also very, very safe. It's a case of the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts.

Yes, grav/energy is a slow combo, but it's tough... It's not an ar/dev situation, where you have two interesting fringe sets combining to make a weak total... It's more like old dark melee/regen, where combined you have an extremely tough plinker.

The problem with energy assault has never been in it's survivability, it's been in it's damage... and I am fairly certain that this is by design. Not that I wouldn't mind the damage being buffed, but I do understand why it hasn't.

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I don't know, I have had much crappier results with icy assault, as it is VERY lowbie-unfriendly, and it is the only other set that shares the powerboost trick.

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You must be talking about endurance usage. Yes Icy can be hard on your endurance, you have to be economical with your attacks, and especially careful with Ice Sword Circle, don't activate it for less than three enemies.

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Yes, I think that I would agree that having to pop a blue at level 18 simply to eliminate '3' minions qualifies as hard on your endurance.

I don't know, I have had much crappier results with icy assault, as it is VERY lowbie-unfriendly, and it is the only other set that shares the powerboost trick.

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PB's getting a bad wrap?


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well, I suggest not using foil. it can make the peanut butter taste metallic. Saran Wrap works best.

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So we're all stupid?

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You said it, not me

how about 'the set for doms that like soloing bosses'?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for energy to have better aoe capacity, but for single-target it's actually above average. people joke about power boost, but outside of domination it's still the best, fastest way to lock down multiple bosses.

I think that the perma-dom crowd has forgotten in many cases how hard things can be for a 'have not'.

(Honestly, I did not understand the value until I accidentally dropped my nrg/nrg blaster into a boss farm... and a blaster, locking down two bosses while killing a third, was absolutely outrageous)


Suppose you are a level 23 dominator. You just got your SO's and are flush with power, and as domnation wears off you rush around a corner and find not one, but TWO bosses standing in front of you.... say, kadabra kill and some lost boss. (and yes, these stupid 2 bosses appear together on HEROIC difficulty as bosses, and eb's at higher difficulties). How would you handle it?

Most dominators would rush in and probably die. Multiple times. an energy dominator would click power boost, hold one boss, stun or sleep the second, and then probably dump all of their damage on the mezzed foes trying to kill one before they wake up. Lo and behold, even with energy's cruddy damage, it is STILL enough to kill a boss before the one they are beating on wakes up.... and then, instyead of two bosses, they only have to face one... easily dealt with with stacking holds.

That one particular situation has killed virtually every squishy character I have brought into it... except for my silly little grav/nrg I was playing just to see if it performs as badly as people claim it does. (It doesn't, by the way) Like I said, don't get me wrong, I still think energy blast could use some improvement, but it's not nearly as gimpy as the 'as the forum turns' crowd likes to make out.

[color=blue] I think she just likes knowing it pisses people off.[color=white]

Actually, in some other MMO's the devs interact even MORE strongly with their playerbase, But I guess with a playerbase of around 300 people, you kinda have to .

Especially if you are counting on them to provide artwork and other stuff to try and make your game bigger :P

Well, Like I said...the compromise they made for SR was based around the way the engine works... it is potentially NOT broken on scrappers and brutes, but I think it's a basic engine problem.


One good side of seeing how broken defense scaling is in CoH.... it made me rethink my 'superhero' tabletop RPG, so that now I have to-hit, damage, dodging, and resistance all weighted fairly equally to allow various types of superheroes instead of that poor martial artist getting pasted any time he gets hit .

Yahoo Fudge.