GeminiProject

I'm not saying capping typed def is hard, it is pretty easy with the abundant IOs and new changes to type/positional def bonuses. I was specifically pointing out that it is a relatively expensive process that still leaves your toon with glaring vulnerabilities while the same process on positional defense leaves no such hole. =)

Why SS/DA? I find the two relatively counterproductive and very far from 'huge payoff' that you mention. SM/DA, yeh, awesome, DM/DA yeh nice nice, SS?

DA is a fun set with toys. You can go the double stack stun way (SM's Fault + Oppressive Gloom) Double stack AoE Fear way (Invoke Panic+CoF), stack defense on top of resists way (CoD+Weave+maneuvers+set bonuses+Darkest Night), and all these roads lead o super fun.

I fail to see the specific reason to pair it up with SS, especially if you plan to double stack stuns with og+handclap. The KB will knock them right out of your gloom where everything but a minion will be unstunned and smack you right back.

But as a general concept toon (non min/max), sure, it probbaly will be fun to play but very painful to keep from running out of blue.

^ What he said, the only place I see DC being used is a little extra aoe once every 45 secs (at uber recharge) and some blue juice when you get hit with -recov and end drain.

DM/WP is awesomely fun to play though.

I'm surprised to say the least for people asking ElA to be buffed, but I guess it is the consequence of having a generally easier resist/def/regen based set (WP) available and largely adopted.

In my experience, ElA does what it is supposed to do very well, and does it similarly to other old school resistance sets, without requiring you to take the whole secondary tree. ElA Provides you with good resistance, increased recharge and infinite blue bar, all the while leaving you a HUGE selection of powers that you an take to complament what you find lacking.

If you find ElA lacking in survivability, you can easily stack 30% positional defense to it using the available power slots and slotting. Top that with Darkest Night and you have yourself a living breathing terror that is extremely survivable, never runs out of endurance.

If every set has a self heal/hp boost end recovery and awesome survivability, then come power customization, we have essentially the same sets with different visuals in al the colors of the rainbow.

My only beef with typed defense is that even after going through the trouble of capping all the damage types and having to spend so much on your toon, you are left with holes in your def. Psi is very expensive def wise to cap and causes a lot of sacrifices in your build and you still have that un defendable toxic damage.

I just cant bare having a toon with such glaring holes in def even after spending hundreds of millions of inf on them. Maybe I just suck at typed defense builds.

If you are not hitting more than one person consistently with shadow maul, there is no reason to use it, it will lower your dps.

On DM/SR, I skip, SMaul and pickup and slot Dark Obliteration for aoe Damage. (I hate lining things up) S Maul is an excellent AoE power IF you don't mind lining up people.

On DM/SD, I always end up having to take S.Maul just so I can slot it with six obliterations for the set bonuses, but I never ever use it.

On very high recharge (perma hasten and 32 sec recharge soul drain) and def capped builds which I aim for, Siphon life lowers your dps, let alone even considering using S.Maul.

MG>Smite>Gloom>Smite>MG is the single target gapless attack chain you should be aiming for with the occasional siphon life for healing.

I was never able to fit Dark Obliteration into an SD build and keep def and recharges up where they should be. SR however is another story.

Dont know if this will help out but, I was market'ing on one toon trying to reprodiuce the bug, and while it seemed quite random here are a few things that I noticed:

1) If I click the chat window to place the active cursor in it, the bug does not happen

2) If I use slash to open chat (which I almost always do), the numbers come up after the slash

3) Even after marketeering a while and making sure the bug did not show up by repeatedly going into chat with the slash-enter key, the bug showed up after I logged and went onto the account name tab. Meaning whatever was buffering the keys, it did not paste them in chat before I logged off, but selectively pasted some in the buffer that was used to paste on the logon screen.
2) Even when

Yea the Server Status page is borked for some reason. Servers are not up yet even though they apparently were in june 24th. =)

You could not place certain items in certain locations before as there were pathing rules, that tried to make it so you could not block access to items that could be destroyed in raids. (among other things)

It was removed, along with many restrictions on where you can place what object. So now basically two objects can occupy the same place, and you can completely block off certain tiems with others or place items deep in raised walls. We basically have a lot of freedom right now for item placement.

Unless the virus over wrote your files, you may be able to recover them by using a rig equipped with a good AV that first removes the virus from your drive(s) and then uses a program built for recovering files to salvage all the deleted files on the HDD or flash drive.

I had HDD wiped and failues happen to me quite often and unless it is a RAID5 with only striped data, you can sometimes recover surprising amounts of data.

On Teams:
Depends on the powersets of the ATs and what the team would befit from having. Basically the same answer to the question what would you have on team [insert AT name] or [insert AT name].

What I mean is, depending on what you have on the team AT AND POWERSET wise, you have different priorities.


In general:
If you are trying to pick a new AT to roll, consider the brutes and scrappers available power choices. Scrappers benefit 50% more from damage buffs, so if you are going for a damage heavy build, the scrapper built right will always outdamage brutes unless you are all at the dagame cap thanks to FS. At the damage cap, both ATs do the same damage.

If you are going solo and are looking at softcapping a defense based secondary, you should keep in mind that scrappers, will have roughly the same survivability as a brute (at the softcap) but will have the higher out of the box damage and benefit 50% more from damage buffs.

Both ATs play relatively the same, but brutes need to keep running to the next spawn. End is therefore your biggest barrier to overcome as a brute.

I personally enjoy brutes more in general, but have been having a lot of fun with my DM/SD scrapper that is a damage powerhouse while being softcapped.

The biggest difference between the two ATs, and the only difference worth even taking into account (besides fury based playstyle differences) is the fact that a team with res buffs can buff a Brute to tanker caps. Any team that can buff damage/def to the caps/softcaps will have the same effect on the brute and scrapper but any team that can buff res to the tanker caps will have tanker level capped brute which can be very very scary.
Of course this means having a lot of sonics, thermals, cold doms on the team which can be very rare.

Clouded:
Shhhh, your're ruining the going rogue party before it begins! =)

DPS chain calculations in a vacuum != same results as one would get by data mining actual performance.

DPS chain numbers != ATs peak/burst/average gameplay damage or anything other than simply, DPS of a given chain, at that recharge, with that slotting, and versus that endless bucket of HP.

I doubt the assumptions we're jumping to in this thread can be backed up by actual data mining. I mean come on, brute FM is on the top of that list. Fire, on paper has the most damage. I can safely say that in both scrappers and brutes, FM toons were pretty darn far from being the most fearful and envy generating toons.

I'm surprised how many 'nerf this' / 'buff that' comments that table alone generated. But again, seeing posted numbers, no matter how theoretical and situational they may be, seems to push peoples buttons to extremes.

We took some attack chains, with some recharge to it and said hey this is what this AT would do if they were hitting something thats not more or less resistant to it, long enough for actual dps to matter (basically a GM, pylon, or AV).

Of course if you up the recharge, add some pool powers, or assume you have rikti monkeys surrounding you, then all hell breaks loose and the order changes up immensely. Lets not even go into the blue bar and how to actually keep the chain going and going and going.

Now if you add in secondaries, some more rikti monkeys, wow look at that, some secondaries REALLY boost the damage don't they, while some really hurt it! Hello DM/SD Scrapper! Hello Fir/Fire scrapper nice damage you pulling with those double dmg buffs.

But hey we should jump to conclusions about the ATs and completely ignore the fact that the enemies that we would be wailing on, huge buckets of HP that make DPS a significant measure, tend to two-three shot both ATs unless they are def capped or in their tier9.

Attack chains, dps, are all very 'make you happy on paper' notions that are pretty damn insignificant in 90% of actual play. Especially when anything lower than bosses cant survive a few hits anyway.

I cringe at the thought of going rouge zombifying the Brute - Scrapper Horse.

I personally never have I felt that, IN GENERAL, my scrappers were under performing compared to my brutes. I also never felt my brutes were oh so more survivable than my scrappers. I tend to build ATs that are as tough as they get, so once you push the envelope that far, everything shines in one aspect and is utterly left in the dust in another.

Situationally, we can always take a slice of the cake that makes us point and say wow look at that, that AT is AMAZING under these conditions. But if we evaluate the whole AT or two ATs per regards to that situational performance, we're really mucking up our judgment.

Great advice in this thread.

I've been mulling over my Ill/Rad for quite some time putting together some build, tearing them apart and putting something else together. I've had a hard time deciding on an APP.

On most builds I have around 220%-2227% global recharge, making the good stuff perma. At this point the choice between APP powers, without hurting recharge, boils down to a few dicy decision.

Earth, albeit horrible looking was very tempting. Seismic smash has some amazing damage and recharging at around 5.5secs makes it uber sexy. But hurl's horrid cast time makes it a chain breaker for me. I chain SW>Blind>Blast>SW etc. Plus with earth I'd have to give up my (hover above and blast) attitude to get up close and personal. Earth's embrace looked very nice for the few moments you'd grab aggro, being at the HP cap softens the blows quite a bit, but I find that if you're getting hit enough to need EE as an ill/rad, you're doing something wrong out of the box.

Perma IW and mez prot sounded sexy until playing with another power to stare at and make sure fired of as it recharged (Hasten, AM, PA are on the perma watch list to fire off as soon as they recharge as is) felt so not sexy at all. I suck at micromanagement as is and adding a fourth ball to the juggle while blasting was too much for me.

Plus I found that I'm only getting hit when resummonning PA, which can= death if I'm soling a 4 man all bos mob, but mez prot is about the last thing I worry about during those seconds. Mez for me turns out to be something a purple cant take care of (being very occasional).

What is boiled down to for me was either Fire for more damage or ice for damage (blast+cone) and hibernate. Hibernate was an excellent aggro deflector for me. Recast PA > Hibernate. It recharges at 57 secs so is ready for every PA cast cycle, slows from ice mesh well with Lingering Rad's slow.

I tried to get more creative by giving up my travel power and spectral terror to add shields into the mix to see if I can sway the decision, but travel less hero toons are a pain in the butt pluss the -hit from ST is nice (stacks with RI if I'm not mistaken)

I ended up going with ice, but if I can find a way to not need hibernate and stay alive while dealing with 5-6 boss spawns, I'd go fire to put them down faster.

Out of experience:

Excluding the specific kryptonite combos that are the Bane of DEF/RES, the def capped brute can consistently waltz around the aggro cap kicking [censored] and taking names simply because of the fact that you actually dodge/deflect the mez/debuff component attached to incoming attacks (when applicable). And we all know the insane amount of slow/drain/confuse/-perception/etc found in the red side.

The def brute does suffer from the oh [censored] condition where while walking around in the aggro cap, three bosses can chain smack you to the mediport room faster than a delaurean can zip through time. The resist capped brute has the foresight of seeing things going sour, and that he will die against certain odds, and that he should high tail out of there unless he wants to carpet munch. Of course, provided he is not snared, slowed or mezzed due to the aggro cap wailing on him.

Res cap is not really possible outside of godmodes (which usually give you some extra status prot and recovery buff or drain resist) unless you've been buffed to it by a sonic/therm team, in which case they should have put those mez shields/status protects on you anyway unless you were simply testing stuff.

If we're not talking about the aggro cap of not so friendlies, but against single AV type situation, both do great unless it is a high accuracy AV. The res capped brute has an advantage, if he is capped to the damage type of the AV, and has enough regen, he cannot be killed outside of a crash or the GW hold o doom by the AV. The Def capped brute can get hit twice within a short period or get hit with a massive blow with dot attached to it and almost-instaneously get zapped out of existence.

So nothing mathematical from me on this matter...

You have got to be kidding me, I was expecting someone to come out and correct me saying mids was broken and/or XYZ factors I was missing... this is insane!

Am I seeing this right, is mids wrong?

Boxing, Kick, Jump Kick, Flurry (otherwise knowns as the crappiest attack powers you take as fillers) are stronger (by a HUGE margin) than almost all of the main attack powwers for brutes? The exception being the highest tier, most damaging attacks in the set.

Lets take the brute primary EM:
Base Damages at 50 according to mids:

Barrage: 88.6
Energy Punch: 64.4
Bone smasher: 99.8
Total Focus: 198
Energy transfer: 214.8

Boxing: 140.9
Kick: 203.2
Jump Kick: 176.2
Flurry: 301

This cant be right... Kick does almost the same base damage as energy transfer and flurry does almost 50% more?

[ QUOTE ]

Now if you are simply asking that Merits be a tradable resource, or even trade-within-account, I am sorry, but that's not going to happen. Characters of different levels earn Merits at different rates. Merits are supposed to streamline the reward process for that character, and that's not going to be changing any time soon.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks for the clarification about this, recent posts made me doubt future merit status. I get the reason behind it. But the end result is: the funnest part of CoX died for me with merits. I rarely play alts anymore. The only thing that is worth it is getting on my merit main and do SF/TF's for merits.

When you think about it, I have not created new alts I played since i13. After all, why bother anymore? If I want to deck out a new brute with IOs, it makes more sense to get all the IOs on my merit main and transfer IOs. But then again, by the time I got enough merits to deck out a second toon on my main... why would I actually create the planned toon? nothing really exciting to do with him that's left except level him up real fast to levels at which he can use merits. And earning merits by playing him in the first place is terribly inefficient.

So while the disparity between merit earning time between chars is a reason not to render merits intra-account, the sheer fact that it exists renders merit earinng on anything less than the optimal toon pointless, thus taking the fun out of creating alts for me.

$.02

Love the video....

ticketing system? replacing merits or a THIRD currency system?

Most people have said what I am going to say, but might as well post it:

I'll try to sum my points up in topics and be objective/subjective about them


Objective:
<ul type="square">[*]Market Supply Has Gone Down
Please data mine the Markets and available recipes before/after i13. Red-side, currently, there is a huge shortage. Besides the recipes that drop from mobs, recipes from the roll pools have dried up.
[*]Random Roll Pool Contents
The random roll pools consist of a huge variety of recipes. Ranging from the very invaluable to the very valuable. This in itself is the root of many problems.

[*]Merits Being Tied to Characters
Merits have rendered playing with alts something do to while waiting for the 24 hour DR counter. This is a big step away from what made this game different.
[*]Red-side SF, or lack of
Red-side has very few SFs. This has become even more apparent with merits.

Villains have 5 SFs without the mini ouro ones to get merits from. 3 trials, all three respec trials. Red-side has NO 30-35 SF. So basically unless you want to run the coop 2 SF/TFs you are stuck with a whopping FIVE SFs to run. Four SFs give 25 merits per run. Only one gives 35 merits per run.

You have to run 10 SFs with level 25 merits to get 250 merits for a highly desirable recipe. This in itself results in repetition of content.
[*]Recipe's Merit Values
Merits per recipe and their past market value have an inconsistent link. Recipes that were not worth that much, now cost many merits. Either the 200-250 merits range is too low for some recipes or too high for others, high/low objectivity depends entirely on how much the devs wants players to grind.
[*]Value of Infamy
Merits have devalued infamy. (notice I said infamy since i have been only running red-side and the same toon since i13 and completely ignoring hero alts so have no idea of influence and WW market). Since there is very little to buy on the BM, influence has lost value. I've been raking up a lot of inf by repeat running the same three SFs over and over and over and over and over and over (did I say over and over yet?), but really, what to spend this on now...
[*]Teaming Impact
Devaluation of influence, and lack of market supply has a negative impact on teaming in general. Merits is really all you want. Why team and do others arcs? If you are really bored of SFs or are crap out of luck and between levels 30-35, you have to run missions. There is no reason to run others missions, you don't get merits for their arcs.


Subjective and Suggestions[*]Market Supply Has Gone Down
This issue, subjectively, means for me, the markets have almost nothing I want to buy, or what is there has gone up in value considerably.
[*]Random Roll Pool Contents
I've always had a problem with this, it is even more apparent now. There are certain recipes that are indeed highly desirable. Most if not every character benefits immensely from them. This was reflected clearly in the recipes market values pre i13. The drop pools contain these recipes and MANY totally invaluable recipes in them. This should not be the case. Sure a random roll at the end of a TF should not mean you will get a recipe you want, but it should NOT give you equal chance of getting a worthless recipe that sells for less inf than a minion defeat yields.

Separate the pool recipes. Sift out the highly undesirables. Keep the highly desirable recipes in one pool, downgrade the worthless recipes in the roll pools to random drop pools. A Random roll should give you a shot at a recipe you can either use or sell for pretty decent cash. This is not the case today.
[*]Merits Being Tied to Characters
I have many alts. I love playing different characters. CoH was unique to me in the sense that it rewarded playing with different characters over the more classical 'me-too' type grind-your-main game play. This is the main reason I've stayed in CoH. Most other MMOs have been about 'your main' and grinding most of the time on him to get him up to par. CoH, offered a way to play different characters, different powers, and different play styles. I could play melee/control/buff and enjoy the game fully. This did not impede in the way of improving one or all characters.

Today I have a merit character, a villain. He's optimized to run the 35 and 25 merit SFs. All he does is 35 merit SF&gt;25 merit SF that is it. That is the most efficient way to accumulate merits red-side for a person with my playtime/hours. There is no reason I should play any other toon today. If I play my other toons I am cutting into time that could be spent accumulating merits on the merit char. This is a big step away from what this game offered in the past. It is taking it towards the me-too pile.
[*]Redside SF, or lack of
I already mentioned I run two SFs over and over now. Please keep in mind that before i13 I did not do a single speed run. Not a single speed run. So I am not a speed runner, I just enjoyed to log in with different chars and run different SF/TFs and play different roles. I did enjoy teaming in PUGs in general or took my better built chars to self challenges. I never felt CoH was repetitive before (I mean we do have a whopping four type of missions that repeat all the time), but now, oh my, I don't think this is any fun anymore.

[*]Recipe's Merit Values
They don't line up. Either bring up the really desirable recipe merit values and make CoH even more of a grind, or lower the merit values for some recipes down.
[*]Value of Infamy
Merits are an alternate infamy now. Period. You can buy anything end everything short of purples with merits. You get infamy up the wazoo whatever you do but you only get merits for specific tasks. This, IMO, is broken. Merits should allow you to buy select recipes and/or things, not everything short of purples. By doing this you have replaced infamy with a much more valuable type of currency. And since the sources of this new currency are limited, this results in the played content to be narrowed.

If merits are supposed to be a parallel currency, then maybe the merit values of items should be reviewed and the tasks that reward them increased. But in this case there needs to be a correlation. Meaning inf/merits should be somewhat balanced.

I think in general, making merits a parallel currency is wrong and counterproductive. Narrowing what can be purchased with them and allowing supply of many recipes back onto the market to be bought with inf should make merits more into 'merits' that you use to buy special items, and less of a parallel elite currency.

[*]Teaming Impact
Many people have gone over this, there needs to be a solution. If Merits are to be awarded at the end of story arcs, then everyone on team should get it.

I haven't done the math, but you could in essence make every non-radio or non-radio-like-contact mission (borea and the borea roman clone guy) give one merit. Sure this means arcs with 12 missions in them give 12 merits. This just means that merit values of items and rewards through SF/TFs need to be increased. But awards playing non-repetitive and highly ignored content, without penalizing teaming.

The values given here are just exemplary and not meant to imbalance the value or merits. I'm simply saying completion of non-repetitive mission content through contacts should give you merits and that the merits awarded through sf/tfs and merits required to purchase items adjusted.[/list]
That mostly sums up my i13 merit thoughts. i13 has deeply changed the way I play the game while most i13 changes were nice additions, I find myself enoying this new way of play a lot less.

Mostly Subjective:

As most people have pointed out, the timer is indeed too long.

Having to switch builds at a trainer is hassle enough, there does not seem to be need for a long timer on top of that. If the problem is about switching builds midfight for exploiting, the switch at trainer takes care of that part. Timer seems like overkill. Or keep a timer but allow to switch anywhere (which seems more dangerous).

The main reason I will NOT be using this feature beyond the late 20s respec on most chars I do, is because of IOs. Most of my alts getting close to their 40s and beyond start to get IOs in their builds. Getting IO sets and uniques has become much much more expensive (redside at least) since i13 and merits. There is no way I am playing one build decked with hundreds of millions worth of inf on one build and SOs in the other. Besides a joke build or a gimp build for gigles.

I prefer to spend time on new characters with diiferent powers rather than keep playing the same char over and over to IO out his second build. This is the lynchpin of what makes CoH a different and enjoyable MMO for me. All other games are about 'maxing your main' getting the next big loot just released whereas CoX has been about developping heroes. I have no 'main' really in this game. I might be in a lonely spot in here however.

I have rarely been this happy about an expansion. I have to say the Dev team deserves much much praise for really listening to the playerbase and working so hard to fullfill expectations.

I've not seen this kind of dedication to player requests anywhere else. In the age in which customer service is being labeled as the concierge for inquisitive idiots, this is exemplary.

Hats off.

/signed

Hmmm... this issue does indeed sound awesome.

Where do I go to beg for huge-oversized™ meat cleavers for brutes? Their non inclusion in the blade type customization can only be considered as a lack of brutality. Get in touch with your brutish side, hack enemies down with meat cleavers. =)

Just a quick question from a still lvl 20 DM/RE...

I love the character which was inspired by your guide, I do however have one single issue which I need thoughts on.

At lvl 20, with this guides build, I have an annoying hole in my chain which bugs me quite a bit.

SP&gt;Smite&gt;SP&gt;??&gt;SP&gt;...

For now I throw in a Maul when I have a few baddies aligned but that does not come up fast enough so I still have this funky gap which I (being impatient) throw a sissy punch (brawl) in.

I was thinking about picking up AirSup to fill this gap. In this case however, I should have gone the fly travel power's way and dropped CJ / SJ.

Any thoughts on this?