GavinRuneblade

Welcome back!


You outleveled them. Those contacts are only good through (I think) level 4 or 5. So head over to kings row. Alternatively, there is a really cool "find contacts" button now. If you open the contacts window its there and lets you cycle through contacts. You can even teleport straight to them.

If all else fails, head to kings row and talk to the detective, he will give you a radio. You can do 3 random missions, and then he will give you a job to protect the kings row or atlas park bank. After you complete the bank mission he will introduce you to a new contact and you'll be good to go.

*summon ornithopter*

*watch pack of redcaps obliterate it*

"Fritz! Fritz, get up for God's sake! Get up! They've killed Fritz! They've killed Fritz! Those lousy stinking yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity-filled vermin! Those despicable animal warmongers! They've killed Fritz! Take that! Take this! Take that, you green slime! You black hearted, short, bow-legged... "

As Blue Centurian said. Villans can pick up epic pools without the patron arc. Both heros and villains have to do the arc to access patron pools. Villains are already villains so can start the arc at will. Heroes have to switch. If a hero doesn't switch they never get the free respec.

And FYI, this is the only freespec that stacks. So on this one, villains win.

That's true choking cloud is one of those 5/6-slots or skip powers. I have it 6-slotted on my fire/rad corr and so I tend to think of it as strong, but in a slot tight build it can be skipped.

Fallout and mutation, I think I'll go with separate team and solo builds.

thanks!

That's a good point. There are three types of ambushes that I am aware of and they can mess with stealth/hide in odd ways. Some are targetted on you and hide/stealth is useless, even going up an elevator doesn't help, they'll chase.

Some are targeting on a location. If you move away they stop and stand around. While they are incoming they ignore stealth. If they get to the location and do not enter combat, they lose this property and you can walk up to them safely. Be out of line of sight when they come into the room though. Hehe.

Some are targetting the party not you specifically, even if you are in a solo mission. These most often come up with escorts. If you run away from the escort and they give their lost text, the ambush will go to them not you every time. Again, just like location based ambushes, you can then approach them safely from hide, but if you stay with the escort they will ignore your stealth. I you have a group with you, then you're screwed on these sorts of ambushes.

That is a location specific ambush. If you let it find you it will ignore stealth. If you are out of line of sight until it stops moving, you can stealth up to it.

Dopples have your same power sets, but they do not copy your build/power choices. And I think they don't get pools/epics but do sometimes have a few special powers given specific missions.

On longbow, I have heard that the eagles have a pulsing AoE that does nothing except cause them to leave melee range. In the past this has been known to break hide. during i19 I checked and it was not doing so. I haven't checked since then and can't promise anything about it now.


Dunno, I never took top foe on a stalker. o.O Good question!

Made me think of this.

Darker colors in the costume generator are harder to see in general. I found the darkest blues worked even better than black to make ice armor almost invisible. I'd start there.

I'm not missing that point, I just don't care. It wasn't relevant to the two posts I was referring to and as for slotting, to me it is a case of po-tay-toe po-tah-toe.

Other than Oblit and Erad for characters who need defense I would prefer to slot posi into all my melee aoes. hehe. It has great bonuses on the individual pieces, a hefty recharge bonus, and the proc is better than almost all melee procs other than the purples (tied with erad but better than oblit, kinetic combat, touch of death or mako thanks to the damage type and TOD's lousy 15% chance to fire).

That and I'm pretty sure this will change soon enough and Im patient.

For the $15 we get everything from the subscription, but also 400 points per month. Those points are part of the pricing plan. You can buy 6 powersets per year with them (assuming all sets are priced at 800 or thereabouts) and those are "free" as part of your subscription.

The other logic error you both seem to be making is that not all powersets were free in the past. We had to pay for villains. We had to pay for Demons. Yes, it is a fact that in the past we got 1-2 powersets for free per year. Others we had to pay for via an expansion. Dual Pistols is another example. If you didn't buy going rogue, you didn't get it.

Most people who had subscriptions had 1200 or 1600 points to spend as part of their subscription when freedom launched. I know at least two who picked up beam and street justice without paying a penny more than their $15. That's already more "free" powersets this year than last year. And we've been told at least one more completely free (as in no need to pay points for it) via the devs in the stream.

They aren't charging a penny for them unless you want to pay. Wait two months and get it as part of your subscription. or pay extra and get it now. Before you had no choice, buy the expansion or never have them. Now you have the option of being patient and getting it later.

This might work well for you because you can see it in action as others use it. It's not the same as testing, but it is something. And, you're not paying a single extra penny even if you choose to take the powerset.

Achilees heel proc and 4x expedient reinforcements for the recharge bonus.

I have played the other primaries, it's just that my mercs was my best character concept (daughter of bloefeldt-like villain with all the mercs named after the most successful henchmen based on how they fared against Bond) so I kept trying and trying and refused to give up even after hitting 50.

As the others have posted, the set does work. It's just that they are stupid even for MM pets they are stupid. And they are the weakest. In every case you'll be more effective if you use thugs. There's no combination where mercs are the "ideal" choice from a mechanical perspective.

But I have a demons/pain at 42, and have tried a bots/traps necro/ff necro/poison nin/trick arrow and thugs/dark (I think I might have forgotten one or two others). None were power leveled, most I soloed using story arcs and all did task forces from time to time (except the thugs who never got high enough). And I got most into the high 20s to mid 30s.

I pretty much don't think the devs will ever fix mercs. But just in case they do Daddy's Lil Tyrant is gutted and moved to exalted, but not deleted. Just in case. All the others are deleted and I'll be wiping the demon/pain once I finish my super group's healing badges. I'll probably never delete my mercs MM, but I've pretty much given up on the dev's ever fixing the issues.

Working a ninja/time now.

That would certainly fix the spec ops problem. And if it was given higher priority on the commando go a LONG way towards helping his AI.

Personally I like the soldiers staying with their bullets because of the heel proc. But on the commando and spec ops, I agree 100%. And on the cool factor. Definitely on the cool factor. =)

On the primaries, I feel that BS and Spines are pretty disadvantaged as well. You'll always be better off with ninja blade over BS except for looks and concept. Damage? Ninja blade is higher over time (significantly) even though less per hit. Speed? ninja blade is faster. Endurance? Ninjablade uses less. AoE? NB has the same as BS and it's up faster so used more often. Defense? this is one where they tie. And you can run similar comparisons against most other primaries and BS will lose again and again. It's just most glaring against ninja blade.

Spines, I've played to 50 and into incarnate. I strongly recommend against it. Not a positive experience. Crap single target, crap AoE. Lots of AoE yes, but crap AoE. Low damage, does dots, long activation times. The worst offender is that spine burst breaks hide at the beginning of a 2-second attack and deals mediocre damage at the end of the animation. I've tried using it as an opener while hidden and occasionally been killed before the damage was applied. Throw spines is as good as it gets, but it still isn't great. I've gone to over 100% damage slotted plus procs and it still sucks for damage. If you want AoE, go electricity. That set is much more effective.

Yes it will be fun, yes it is soloable. No it is not the best choice for a first time controller/dom. But also, no it is not the worst. I think that would be ice/fire as the hardest learning curve.

Learn to leverage your aoe sleep patch, you will dearly need it. Slot that baby early and use it a lot.

My elec/earth has been relying on the sleep and knock powers in /earth for mitigation. I'm just about to enter first ward and it's been a smooth journey for me.

/elec has less mitigation than /earth so I think you'll have a little bit of a harder time of it. But there are A LOT of very vocal fans of elec/elec so I know its a viable build.

Personally I recommend people learn with plant/fire or earth/fire. But there's not really too many bad choices.

I would consider paying my friends in the russian maffia to kill any dev that gives us dark assault without the PBAoE +Dam power whose name I always forget.

Well, no I wouldn't. But I do want that one in the set very very very much.

I found that lots of movement is the key. I was on a team where someone pulled 4 packs of the all engineer groups on the bridges and they have huge def bonuses near allies. But if you move, especially backing in and out. they get strung into lines and you can pick them apart.

It doesn't favor AoE efficiency that's for sure. But ST-focused sets or builds would hardly be slowed down at all.

You're misreading Ardea's post. The point is that only one piece of posi's set modifies range and people usually only 5-slot anyway. Same with many of the other sets. It is easy to skip the individual pieces with a range bonus because those pieces are a minority. Ard was not saying that sets with such pieces don't exist or are rare.

I thought claws outperformed dual blades on stalkers due to the combos needing you to use AS.

and regen on a stalker is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. dull pain is just a heal, basically no +hp if you have your accolades, the click powers force redraw, claws and DB both have no parry to give defenses, and the stalker's lower HP translate into lower HP/s numbers.

Mathematically, the items with the highest total bonuses will get the highest increase. this would be HOs and Quads, but they don't work on HOs (I was for a moment dreaming of the power of a 53+++++ HO before that was ruthlessly crushed).

However, there is no "best" as there are so many different applications.

Quads will rarely (possibly never) give you enough of any single bonus to remove a slot from a power. But bumping a common recharge can let you take a slot out of haste and still be perma, giving you a slot back somewhere else.

Again, several of teh bonuses from a quad may be hitting ED limits so the boost might be wasted. Targetting the boost to an IO where there are two values that aren't near the limit, instead of 4 where 2 are at the limit and 2 are half the size of the dual IO, is clearly giving you less bang for your buck.

To put some numbers to this. Let's say the Obliteration Quad. Damage and Recharge are already hitting the ED caps if you're running the full set or even 5/6 of the set. Accuracy and End are only 18.6% each on the quad but neither is near ED limits. Adding a boost pushes them to 19.53 a gain of 0.9 Acc and 0.9 End. On the other hand, if you could enhance the acc/end from multistrike's double that starts at 26.5% and goes up to 27.83, for a gain of 1.33%. Since you can drop in five boosters the total is 4.5% per stat on the quad, vs 6.65% on the dual. So if you can use all four stats boosted, the quad is better. If only three they are roughly equal, and if you would hit ED or two or more from the quad, then boosting the dual is better.

It's reasonable to say that in many cases pushing a dual or single will give your build more benefit than a quad or a triple. But you have to look at every power individually. Most people

I believe this is correct.

Though if you ever needed to maybe you could create some out of game IP that uses the SG name (like a cheesy web comic hosted anywhere free, like deviant art or drunk duck or anywhere really) then petition that the SG name violates your trademark and ask a GM to rename it.

I have no idea if this would work. But it's the best I can come up with.