Fulmens
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Posts
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Joined
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There's still a moderate market for 33's. I'd have to go back and look at who was buying my random rolls, but I know I sold at least one set of thirty L33 rolls.
Edited to add: I'm pretty sure 35s sell for better prices than 32s, 33s OR 30s. 30s get supply every time there's an invasion. -
Quote:I don't even know how close I can come to fixing this. Will check after work.Originally Posted by Plasma
Heh. You should check the leaderboard before a post like this.
@goat's apparently decided we had it too easy, and we are now 36B infl out of 1st.
EDIT: Close to 30 billion. Will drop off later. -
Quote:Do you have any idea how wrongheaded this post sounds to people who aren't you? Me, for instance?Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
That's retarded. I guess if you're talking about poor people Blasters that'd be true, but I'm pretty sure "if you're poor you're doing it wrong" is a longer standing indication of failure. At the high end, controlled by a skilled player, /Mental Blasters will still be at a performance level that's unreachable by every other Blaster secondary.
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So do we want to stay comfy on Virtue, or do we want to dust off the Freedom 88s? (That's going to be a VERY HARD project, if we do it.)
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Quote:I figure, roughly, I can make on the order of 20 million inf per converter- more if I'm converting purples. So you burn an extra 20M, making me happy, and make an extra 100M [more if purples], making you happy. Everybody wins!
You can get twice as many by converting them to Hero Merits first, though it costs an extra 20M Inf. -
Love it.
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Quote:Why should you have to suck because you wanted to do something fun instead of making the Flavor of the Month?Originally Posted by mercykilling
Wow. Whatever happened to just playing the game and having fun?
Seems all anyone cares about any more is numbers. Minmaxed builds that can solo AV's and GM's. Crashless nukes.
It -makes sense in any MMO- to have singular bad guys that can wipe whole city blocks and possibly beat assembled heroes.
It -makes sense- that your super attack that you summon every ounce of energy to fire leaves you winded and unable to attack for a bit.
At least, it makes sense to me. Might not to everyone, I know.
Again, all the above is merely my opinion. Completely without basis in any other fact than my feelings. I do not wish to be "proven" wrong with a load of numbers, because I don't care about numbers. I care about what -I- call fun, and not what you call fun. (Insofar as my fun does not impede upon your fun)
The people who care about numbers are working to make things better for you. Even though you may find the work distasteful and unpleasant. Think of us like garbagemen. You don't have to watch us work if you don't want to. -
KABOOM
that is all. -
The invention system can be VERY complicated. It's out there, it's shiny, it will give you moderate-to-severe improvements in power level but nowhere near as much as [for instance] teaming with a good Defender.
A bit of history: the training, dual, single-origin system predates the invention system by a few years. The IO system is sort of an optional replacement. A little better, ten times as complex.
I'd stick with DOs and SOs until you feel fairly comfortable with the rest of the game. -
Quote:Hey, it's not as painfully slow as it used to be.
Are you even going to USE Hover? -
Umm.
You might want to pretend it's a sequel, "City of Heroes Extreme" or something, and start over at level 1. There are many things the same, but I think it's more different than similar.
ED, specifically, means you pretty much can't slot more than about 95% bonus no matter how much you put in a power. (three SO's = 100%; that's where the rule comes from.) So "one accuracy five damage" is dead.
The invention system opens up new levels of power for new levels of influence. You can go with generic IO's (like SO's, maybe a little better, but they never "go red"), you can "frankenslot" with a mix of cheap IO's and get 30-60% more accuracy/recharge/endurance/whatever, or you can start spending a lot of money on set IO's and practically make an entire new secondary.
It is also very, very complex. I would advise sticking with SO's until you feel like you have a handle on the rest of the game changes. -
I don't play Dominators either. So this is an actual question.
In a world [handwave] where survival isn't a problem, is there a Dom build that can compete on regular AOE damage with a three-ranged-AOE build like Fire/Mental? The thing I noticed in my [very level-limited] Blaster/Scrapper comparison was that a Shadow Maul that hit three people was "exceeds expectations", while a ranged cone that hit five was "not trying hard enough." I'm not sure how PBAOE compares to a ranged cone in terms of number of people hit.
It looks like most Doms have about two significant AOEs in the secondary and maybe one or two sets have a really damaging AOE in the primary?
I know there are Brutes that have large amounts of high-damage AOE available to them on an every-ten-second basis. I know there are lots of Blasters in a similar situation (/fire, /mental, and //elec all provide that third AOE that seems so handy in eliminating all minions .)
Doms seem a little short on mass damage, but that's entirely theorycraft on my side. What are the key aspects I'm overlooking? -
Quote:Adding 400% regen is like taking a small green insp every 15 seconds, if my math is right (400% per 4 minutes -> 100% per minute -> 25% every 15 seconds. And, to mangle Iron Man, my math is sometimes right.)
For those of us that can't understand what 380% regen means, can we have a rough translation? HP/sec doesn't mean much either since I have no idea what a level 50's HP are and I never play there. -
Rakeeb: There's a mistake in your math, but the difference is still enormous and the qualitative truth is still there.
Quote:Getting hit 5% of the time instead of 50% of the time is taking 90% less damage than he would otherwise. So 1200 damage worth of attacks instead of 2400. Eight times less damage, not sixteen; still ludicrously tougher and not playing the same game.Well, the defense bonuses mean that both have some survival ability. The +10% defense of the first blaster means he gets hit 40% of the time vice 50% from a minion, so we'll go with him taking 20% less damage than he would otherwise. The +45% defense of the second blaster means he gets hit 5% of the time by that same minion, so he's taking 95% less damage than he would otherwise. So the first blaster has to be hit for 150 damage' worth of attacks to lose 10% of his health... not a huge difference, but noticeable. The other guy has to be hit by 2400 damage' worth of attacks to lose that same 10% of his health. That's a pretty drastic difference!
TwoHeadedBoy: I think other people have pretty much made my responses. "You're stupid and you're wrong for playing the game your way and not my way" is not, really, a good approach; especially not when you're talking about tools that are not in your character's primary or secondary. Especially when you're saying people are stupid and wrong for taking, what, 6 out of 7 secondaries for Blasters.
If you're seventy times tougher than me, we are not playing the same game. We should not be on the same team. The devs have fallen down here. -
TwoHeadedBoy: I think the crux of the disagreement is this:
Quote:I don't know what HER perspective is. MY perspective is that no two people playing the same AT, played by people who have avoided the obvious pitfalls, should be more than, say, a factor of 5 apart in performance.Your perspective seems to be overall that everything in the game should be equally accessible for casuals, and players with lower skill and investment levels should be able to attain the same or comparable results
YOUR perspective, and maybe you don't realize this, is that a moderately skilled player with a sufficiently expensive build and the right powersets should be 20 times tougher than someone who did not make that choice. Maybe more- Arcanaville, where is the line of immortality for a S/L capped fully-Drain Psyche'd Blaster? Where is it for a blaster with 10% Defense and slotted health?
I was here, as you were not, in the Good Old Days before ED. Back when an Invuln tank was at least ten times tougher than an Ice tank, back when someone who took a Dark Armor scrapper to 50 was considered the most hardcore human in the room. It is not an exaggeration to say that an INV tank could go AFK forever under a pile of a hundred and fifty purple-con enemies.
There were two games, really: the tough guys and the not-so-tough guys. And the devs could either build something that would challenge the tough guys and slaughter everyone else faster than they could hit a green insp [literally] or build something that was trivial to the tough guys and balanced for everyone else.
It's a great game if you're the pretty pretty princess. But it's a great game BECAUSE it sucks for everyone who's not you.
That's what you're asking for. If that's what you actually want? A factor of 20? The hell with that and the hell with you. -
You're sort of asking the wrong question (at least this month). "How can I live longer on a Blaster" is like "How can I kill faster on an Empath".
Having said that: Blaster secondaries have a remarkably sparse set of tools worth using.
* Build Up or equivalent
* High powered attacks, usually melee/single target but sometimes not
* Single-target mitigators
* A few actual mitigators that you can use to live longer against the whole spawn.
I'm going to suggest three: Ice, Mental and Energy.
ICE: IMO best for surviving the fight, period. The gem of this set is Shiver, in my opinion. If you survive the alpha, you will live two to three times longer than with any other set, because it's got THAT much -Rech in it. It also has -RunSpeed, so you may never get melee'd at all if you don't want to. (That's like a second alpha, with higher damage...) It's a ridiculous enormous cone, so you may aggro people you can barely see, but it's totally worth it. Ice also has solid melee/singletarget damage, Ice Patch, and a melee hold . The only slight problem is that active mitigation takes up time, and for a typical blaster your half-life is like six seconds.
MENTAL: A latecomer set, so better designed. Has an actual ranged cone, so if you can survive for three attacks you can drop big batches of minions with nearly any primary. That cone *also* has a very good -recharge component, which literally translates into longer life in combat. It has Drain Psyche, which is potentially ridiculously good. I have never been able to get it to work that well, but top performers do crazy things with it. Either of those powers would make it a top performer in my book. Oh, and it's got a big PBAOE hitter. Minuses: not a lot of single target melee damage.
ENERGY: If a Blaster is "damage with damage on top", /Energy is the classic "Damage on top". Two fast, very hard hitting melee single target attacks that also have a good chance of stun are the core of this power set. (Elec has the same attacks but sleep; MUCH worse defensively, even if I do think it's prettier.) It has perma-able Boost Range, so you can hover hundreds of feet in the air and actually outrange some enemies for once. (Range is a defense, for this and only this set.)
The main plus for Energy, to me, is "I have more big hitter attacks than some Scrappers have attacks, period." If you take the risk of running into melee, which I do frequently, you can inflict terrible damage in about a second and a half and then fire brutal ranged attacks on the way out. And anything that survives might be too stunned to shoot.
Oh, and Sonic primary has a spectacular AOE sleep that lasts a lifetime, if you don't mind bopping badguys on the head individually. -
Tried this on a L49 stone/will brute (zero defeats) and a L33 dark/sonic defender (three defeats in the same fight, first boss of the second mission.) I'm going to consider this to be a case where medium build squishies get spanked hard, and it's just a question of HOW hard.
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Quote:Sorry to be, perpetually, picking on you, Princess Darkstar.
once you are on a team with even 1 survivability buffing defender (Such as a bubbler)
But picking the best friend a Blaster can have* may not exactly be the typical case. I have seven and a half years of Force Field defender experience; trust me on this one.
* If the FF defender puts the little bubbles on you and dies IMMEDIATELY they've upped your survivability by at least a factor of two. If they're doing their job they've upped your survivability by a factor of 10, pretty much no matter what else happens. FF defenders are exceptions to the "Blasters will find a way to die" rule. -
Quote:I entirely disagree with this statement.
I am willing to concede that mitigation matters a bit more than I suggested, but I still think the situations where it matters are rarer than the situations where more damage is being helpful, to the point that soft or hard to leverage mitigation is often over valued -
I've never slotted Kismets . Guess it's time to buy, like, eight for personal use.
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What flea said there.
I tend to think that with twenty minutes of explanation (at most) and six hours of prep work, nobody who pays for a subscription is poor. -
Quote:Couple things: First, it's not science if other people can't replicate my results. I might have had a hideously off day, I might have powers I didn't even use that make all the difference, because I really don't play Dethermalizer much. I wanted to know what it feels like for other people.
I'm not sure what kind of data point this really determines.
Second, if we have the data points now, live, we can see what it feels like in issue 24 beta and see if it feels like enough of a change.
Third, I not-so-secretly hope that Arbiter Hawk tries this and goes "Holy Thor, did I just get killed a lot. Guys, come here and try this." And shiny buffs rain down on Blasters from above. -
Lothic:
Endurance drain, from the if-I-were-a-Dev standpoint, is a bear because you're either cleaning up entire spawns in relative safety or you're getting nothing from it. I have had characters where it was very valuable and characters where it was worthless.
Elec is not necessarily qualitatively worse than other sets- it's very different. Ranged nuke, second AOE full of end drain, Voltaic Sentinel... it's not like the other kids. It can, as I mentioned, near-neuter an entire spawn in about five seconds. Or it can leave you stranded in a bad neighborhood getting beaten to death.
I have absolutely no problem with your suggested changes to Elec Blast- I wouldn't want Charge Up to do less damage boost than Aim and I have no problem with it being a power that, objectively, is better than Aim. I might lower the recharge on Short Circuit from 20 sec to 16, just because.
I have another idea that I suggested to Arbiter Hawk, but I don't even know if it's technically doable let alone attractive to him, so i'm not going to run my mouth about it.
Edited to say: Elec may objectively have lower DPS and more DOT so enemies shoot back more before dying. If those are your only measures, you can say that Elec is objectively worse. On the other hand, I can nuke people who don't know I'm there, take one step behind a corner, and be safe from return fire. -
Lothic: It is possible for something to be fun and underperform. However, if you let underperforming sets STAY underperforming just because they're fun...you're asking people to choose between fun and performance. Those shouldn't be exclusive options.
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TL;DR Try SSA #3 on a solo Blaster, +1/x2, starting with empty insp tray, and let me know how you do.
I was just trying to figure out if "Regen is going to be enough" to fix blasters, more or less, and I got thoroughly spanked. I was trying to see how an Ice blaster performs, on the theory that enemy -speed and -rech should give similar results to +regen . I had an old Ice/Ice with a near-Frankenslot build that I hadn't touched since issue 9 and I had a really off day. I started scrapperlocking and it just spiraled down from there.
I actually proved either that "A blaster who's not paying attention is a dead blaster, all the time" or "Arachnos is full of Blaster-killing." Maybe both.
It occurs to me that this is probably a good test for Blaster performance.
Rules: Start with an empty insp tray, on +1/x2. I had no useful insps left after SSA #2. If you can keep the NPCs alive, go you; they died about the first or second time I did.
Please post what sets you're using, rough level of IO's (none/frankenslot/some set bonuses/dream build) and how you performed.
My experience was that frequently, one or two guys would all of a sudden get ugly [come in from another spawn, get unslowed, whatever], drop some burst damage in on me and I'd go from, like, 75% HP to 10% HP and immobilized.