Gen_Prot_Fault

Thank you both, much obliged - will hopefully be in touch soon.

Hi All,

Been gone a couple of years and thought it was high time I returned to the villain bashing (and ofc being villainous myself at times).

A lot of what I'd have considered busy zones are nearly empty atm (I even got asked what I meant when I said I had the Frostfire mish ready the other day O_o). I understand this is at least partially due to the MA system.

So partly this is a shout out to any other old timers interested in more traditional content and partly a query to see if there are any more traditional SG's around at the moment perhaps who might have me?

Edit: Didnt necessarily mean "Old Timers" as in IRL

Belldandy: 50 Kin/Psy Defender
Twilight Nocturne: 43 Tri-Form Warshade
Flash Freeze: 35 Ice/Ice Tanker
Meatshield: 16 Shield/Warmace Tanker

General Protection Fault: 40 Bot/Dark MM
Makie: 43 Fire/Fire Brute
Psycho Bob: 20 Thugs/Pain Domination MM.

[ QUOTE ]
The thing with auto healing, unless you have a fast recharge on it, the chances are you'll have just used it when a team mate really needs it.

[/ QUOTE ]

All valid points you guys made, in the case of Kin it worked for me very well though, bypassing the "fast recharge" problem with Hasten + Siphon Speed keeping it running fast and as an extra "service" to the team, since I'm supposed to be a buffer and concentrating on Fulcrum/SB/etc rather than a "healer". I'm sure it depends on the team, I know my Ice tanker can go a long way without a "healer" but there are some teams that just badly need it.

I very much doubt I'd use the same tactic on any other build though, as the heal would be harder to control as you say, you'd be probably not in the thick of it where needed, as well as it not running fast enough without hasten + siphon speed.

Would you mind enlightening me then please? It's something I was very conscious of when I first started that defender, feeling I was "being a n00b" by running my heal on Auto centered on the tank most of the time.

I totally appreciate that an empath/dark/rad/fire sat at the back running healing aura with nobody nearby is a pointless waste of endurance, but what really separates them - apart from the personal opinion of "this is actually having an effect".

I don't think any user-generated channel is suitable in these cases personally, not least of which because it's not official - I know the suggestion of using Forumites (which I have on my globals, but usually keep quiet on) as a help channel seems laughable - I suspect you're more likely to be drowned out by a discussion about muffins/chickens/other random convo (not that's there's anything wrong with that, it's a general chat channel), and spamming that channel wouldn't go down well either. As so many have suggested, the inbuilt channel system needs an overhaul - my thoughts here are:

* Making more channels like Arena/Request/etc usable for the correct purpose, server wide and actually useful. I know in a year I've never seen request used for anything useful, nor help, and I often see unrelated speech bubbles on generic stuff above peoples heads, then realise it's Arena chat (I have it hidden). Since those auction houses seem to be going in, perhaps the WoW model someone mentioned before isn't so far-fetched (good grief, why do I keep mentioning THAT game ) - Server wide channels: Help, Arena/PvP, Looking For Team, Trade perhaps, whack 'em on their own tab called "Server Chat" instead of Help and away you go.
* Adding more global inbuilt, auto-enrolled channels, maybe actually doing something with that Help tab we had foisted on us a while back . Needless to say this would need the global channel limit changing, which I suspect may cause yet more global channel fun and games.
* A simple one this, why not, in global channels (optionally somewhere in settings, probably on by default) suffix our server name to our global id, so @Bill would show as "Bill [Defiant]" or something? Would be better if it only did it for people on another server, so local server people didn't see the suffix.

[ QUOTE ]
Take for instance *cough* wow here, that has a faction-wide (or one that you hear in all cities?) channels for groupfinding and trading at least which are in peoples chat tabs by default. In addition it has a 'general' channel afaik (im no WoW-expert so please correct me if I make mistake).

[/ QUOTE ]

The LFT, Trade, etc channels are only visible in the main 3 cities of each faction, and even then only fairly recently, previously they had separate versions of each of those channels per City. OFC it was possible to manually join these channels with /commands (very handy when you're somewhere awkward and your priest just left - though it had an inexplicable habit of stopping the auto channel joining working for the rest of your life (WoW's /B chat etc showed as visible channels, complete with "you joined xxx channel, you left xxx channel" on zoning).

Edit: Wow, my spelling's awful tonight

On my kin defender I often auto spammed my heal with my target set to the tank so that anyone in melee range got healing. I remember discussing it with various mates and it was generally well received. I'm not saying spam healing is always useful or is good tactics, but hastened + siphon speeded heal spam from my kin when there was no dedicated "healer" around (and even if there was in some cases ) was definitely helpful.

Also ofc I was running Fulcrum, Siphon Power, Siphon Speed, Speed Boost, Heal Other's for spot healing, the odd Increase Density, Transference and a few other bits, so it wasn't a laziness thing...honest

Oddly the only time anyone pulled me up on it was on a GM - them:"The spam healing isn't required!" me:"Oh, you don't want the -regen component then?". Bit like the time someone told me to put my WS in Dwarf mode rather than Nova on a GM...because the DPS was higher

Another fun strip there m8, good one.

[ QUOTE ]
..or your mate who's actually a Warshade

[/ QUOTE ]

Could that be speaking from experience Steel?

Thanks Shannon, some interesting points there.

I've got the wierd situation with Stamina, as I wanted to be ready to take it if needed, but wanted to see if I could get by with just Energy Absorbtion first. So the spec reflects my current build up to 25, and then I popped stamina in pretty much anywhere as a placeholder.

Hehe, the res at 49, frankly I didn't know what else to bother with, didn't think about Build Up + Ice Storm

[ QUOTE ]
Well, slotting Stamina for accuracy is certainly original.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL, don't you love the builders occaisonal habit of messing slottings up

Yeah, I'm not sure about stamina really, I've managed this long even running 6 toggles - but then I'm not attacking that much. That's why I've left it so late (I'm lvl25 atm) so I can see if I need it after I get Energy Absorbtion.

If I don't need it, I was thinking of swapping it out for Tough, I've seen some ice tankers do this I think, but I'm not 100% convinced of it's effectivness. I would give me a spare slot for Hasten though

I've got my tanker up to about lvl25 atm, and I'm doing fine without stamina though I suspect that will change when I have more than 1 attack and ice patch.

Going forward, this is roughly what I'm looking at, any feedback appreciated:

---------------------------------------------
Exported from Ver: 1.7.6.0 of the CoH_CoV Character Builder
---------------------------------------------
Name: Flash Freeze
Level: 50
Archetype: Tanker
Primary: Ice Armor
Secondary: Ice Melee
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Frozen Armor==> EndRdx(1)DefBuf(3)DefBuf(3)DefBuf(5)
01) --> Frozen Fists==> Acc(1)Rechg(15)EndRdx(15)Dmg(25)Dmg(27)Dmg(27)
02) --> Hoarfrost==> Rechg(2)Rechg(5)Rechg(7)Heal(7)Heal(9)Heal(9)
04) --> Chilling Embrace==> EndRdx(4)Taunt(11)Slow(50)
06) --> Wet Ice==> EndRdx(6)
08) --> Combat Jumping==> Jump(8)
10) --> Taunt==> Rechg(10)Rechg(11)Taunt(13)Taunt(13)
12) --> Icicles==> EndRdx(12)EndRdx(17)Acc(17)Dmg(19)Dmg(19)Dmg(21)
14) --> Super Jump==> Jump(14)
16) --> Swift==> Run(16)
18) --> Glacial Armor==> EndRdx(18)DefBuf(21)DefBuf(23)DefBuf(23)
20) --> Ice Patch==> Rechg(20)Rechg(25)EndRdx(33)
22) --> Health==> Heal(22)
24) --> Frost==> Acc(24)Rechg(29)EndRdx(29)Dmg(31)Dmg(31)Dmg(31)
26) --> Energy Absorbtion==> Rechg(26)DefBuf(37)DefBuf(39)DefBuf(40)EndMod(40)EndMod(40)
28) --> Aid Other==> Heal(28)
30) --> Aid Self==> IntRdx(30)IntRdx(33)IntRdx(33)Heal(34)Heal(34)Heal(34)
32) --> Hibernate==> Rechg(32)EndMod(43)Heal(46)
35) --> Greater Ice Sword==> Acc(35)Rechg(36)EndRdx(36)Dmg(36)Dmg(37)Dmg(37)
38) --> Stamina==> Acc(38)EndMod(39)EndMod(39)
41) --> Block of Ice==> Acc(41)Rechg(42)EndRdx(42)Hold(42)Hold(43)Hold(43)
44) --> Ice Blast==> Acc(44)Rechg(45)EndRdx(45)Dmg(45)Dmg(46)Dmg(46)
47) --> Ice Storm==> Rechg(47)EndRdx(48)Dmg(48)Dmg(48)Dmg(50)Slow(50)
49) --> Resuscitate==> Rechg(49)
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Power Slide==> Empty(1)
01) --> Sprint==> Empty(1)
01) --> Brawl==> Empty(1)
01) --> Gauntlet==> Empty(1)
02) --> Rest==> Empty(2)
---------------------------------------------

Thanks for the advice guys, I rolled an ice/ice tanker last night - yeah, I know I'm not going to be good dps, but I'm more aiming for team support anyway.

Had an utter blast with it, but I've not got much from Ice Melee yet, so time will tell about that.

Thanks for the input everyone.

I'm still a little unsure, but I'll probably give ice a bash as it does look fun. Just that Hibernate looks a bit "meh" compared to unstoppable, and on paper at least, inv looks more powerful to me.

Thanks again for the excellent advice.

I'm purely PvE, aren't interested in Stone/xx as it just doesn't suit me and wish to avoid Fire/xx for the usual reasons and the fact my brute was fire/fire.

I tried an inv/ss a while back, and found actually holding aggro a chore at low levels, so I was looking at ice, maybe ice/fire.

How does ice/xx compare to inv/xx? Obviously aggro holding will be much better at low levels, but would inv/xx be a better choice overall, or is Invinciblity just not as good at holding aggro as ice (due to it's multiple dmg/effect auras)?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Okay, 10 days on, and there's been no new bugs raised - so either nobody's using it (even the circle of friends I asked to give it a try ), or it's working as intended (it's after all not the most complex thing on the face of the planet).

If you have tried this app and found a bug, can you please post here or PM me, otherwise I'll fix the one minor display bug I know of (as shown in the release notes) and release the current beta as v1.00.

Thanks

[ QUOTE ]
One thing that I would find useful is a brief pointer as to what settings make the biggest difference? There seems to be a minefield of different graphics settings contained within CoX, and whilst some are fairly self explanatory, others make absolutely no sense whatsoever!

So what are the big hitters? What are the options that can make or break graphical performance?

[/ QUOTE ]

Pretty sure that's dependant upon the particular vendor/model of graphics card you've got - nvidia/ati, card series, DirectX features supported, drivers.

[ QUOTE ]
If this works, I'm nominating you for September's Creative Genius.

[/ QUOTE ]

If it doesn't for any reason, could you drop me a note in this thread or via a PM.

I've been using this tool consistently myself for the last 2-3 weeks while I waited for confirmation it wasn't EULA breaking and it's been fine - so much so that it's been able to fix my most excessive (controlled) messing around with the CoX registry settings (like setting the game to a resolution of 0 x 0, or deleting keys altogether), but you never know, I could have packaged a file incorrectly or let a silly little bug though (for example, the first time I ran it on anyone elses machine, I discovered that not all CoX PCs have *all* the registry keys).

Also, it's untested on the US City of Heroes though it should work fine and has code in to detect it.

CoV often performs significantly worse than CoH and requires the user to turn down their graphics settings. This is because CoV has a much higher polygon count than CoH.

Following on from this discussion, I created a tool that allows you to create "profiles" - a record of your graphic settings - and switch between them quickly and conveniently from outside the game.

So, for example, you could have a preset for CoH at high resolution, high detail and a seperate profile for CoV that has a lower detail with various effects turned off. Switching between them is as simple as selecting the option from a list and pressing Apply.

The tool is now available publicly for testing since I've had confirmation that the methods it uses don't break the EULA. If anyone is interested in trying this application, please feel free to visit philsanders.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk and download it. Please submit any bugs/suggestions/etc to me either by PM or via the email address in the applications online help.

Hopefully this tool can be as useful to the community as it is to myself.

Could do with adding Belldandy, kin/psi/psi defender as well please.

I did my respec last night, based on the build posted above (tweaked as per Shynet's suggestions...

Gotta say, wow, what a difference. Adding the end reds to the dwarf attacks (well, the two main ones) and taking them out of the form itself has changed my dwarf form from an end-hemorraging white elephant into a pretty effective and useable form. Same with the 3 heals, which I'd not had the chance to add before.

I'm defo running out of end a lot more than before in nova form, even though it's currently running as 2 x tohit 2 x end mod (as a test), which I put down to the fact Hasten is up a lot more and the end crash from that when it expires at awkward times in-battle.

Loving SS + Shadow Cloak into mobs before Mire + Eclipse as well, works a treat for me.

Yeah, personally I'd pay good inf to swap those lvl47/49 skills for extra slots

Thanks for the feedback m8,

I've always overlooked Stimulant, but in this case I guess it could be quite handy for bringing a mezzed healer back into play. I was originally thinking of Aid Other for healing my pet, but they churn over so fast, and the downtime is low with hasten etc, it's not really a huge issue imo. This also neatly frees up 2 slots for the interrupt reductions in Aid Self

The wipe recovery possibilities of this build have actually got me much more interested again in the post 41 run, where previously I was feeling a bit "meh" about that part of the game, as there was nothing compelling for me to look forward to.

* ...you agonise over every single slot as if your life depends on it.

* ...half the new additions to the group start chat with "so, who's your 50?"

* ...you keep doing impressions of an orbiting defense satellite in Nova form.

* ...you hang around in Atlas/a Station posing (admit it, we all seem to do it at sometime )

On a similar note, and not wishing to hyjack the thread, but provide more food for thought - I'm planning a similar build and this is what I've come up with so far...

---------------------------------------------
Exported from Ver: 1.7.6.0 of the CoH_CoV Character Builder
---------------------------------------------
Name: ws50
Level: 50
Archetype: Warshade
Primary: Umbral Blast
Secondary: Umbral Aura
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Shadow Bolt==> Acc(1)
01) --> Absorption==> DmgRes(1)
02) --> Ebon Eye==> Acc(2)
04) --> Gravity Shield==> DmgRes(4)
06) --> Dark Nova==> TH_Buf(6)TH_Buf(7)TH_Buf(7)EndMod(11)EndMod(46)
08) --> Hasten==> Rechg(8)Rechg(9)Rechg(9)
10) --> Aid Other==> Heal(10)Heal(50)Heal(50)
12) --> Sunless Mire==> Acc(12)Rechg(13)Rechg(13)Rechg(40)Dmg(48)
14) --> Shadow Cloak==> EndRdx(14)
16) --> Super Speed==>
18) --> Gravity Well==> Acc(18)Hold(48)
20) --> Black Dwarf==> DmgRes(20)DmgRes(21)DmgRes(21)EndMod(23)EndMod(46)
22) --> Stygian Circle==> EndMod(22)
24) --> Nebulous Form==> EndRdx(24)
26) --> Unchain Essence==> Acc(26)Dmg(27)Dmg(27)Dmg(29)Rechg(43)Rechg(45)
28) --> Gravity Emanation==> Acc(28)DisDur(50)
30) --> Aid Self==> Heal(30)Heal(45)Heal(45)
32) --> Dark Extraction==> Acc(32)Dmg(34)Dmg(34)Dmg(34)Rechg(36)Rechg(43)
35) --> Quasar==> Acc(35)Dmg(36)Dmg(36)Dmg(37)Rechg(40)Rechg(43)
38) --> Eclipse==> Rechg(38)Rechg(39)Rechg(39)
41) --> Stygian Return==> Rechg(41)
44) --> Resuscitate==> Rechg(44)
47) --> Grant Invisibility==> EndRdx(47)
49) --> Starless Step==> Acc(49)
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Power Slide==> Empty(1)
01) --> Sprint==> Empty(1)
01) --> Brawl==> Empty(1)
01) --> Shadow Step==> Empty(1)Empty(3)Empty(3)Empty(5)Empty(5)
01) --> Dark Sustenance==> Empty(1)
02) --> Rest==> Empty(2)
10) --> Shadow Recall==> Empty(10)
---------------------------------------------
06) --> Dark Nova Blast==> Dmg(6)Dmg(42)
06) --> Dark Nova Bolt==> Dmg(6)Dmg(42)
06) --> Dark Nova Detonation==> Dmg(6)Dmg(11)Dmg(15)Rechg(17)Rechg(19)
06) --> Dark Nova Emmanation==> Dmg(6)Dmg(15)Dmg(17)Rechg(19)
20) --> Black Dwarf Strike==> Acc(20)Dmg(37)Dmg(39)
20) --> Black Dwarf Smite==> Acc(20)Rechg(23)Rechg(25)EndRdx(25)Dmg(29)Dmg(31)
20) --> Black Dwarf Mire==> Acc(20)Rechg(31)Rechg(31)Rechg(40)Dmg(48)
20) --> Black Dwarf Drain==> Acc(20)Acc(33)Heal(33)Heal(33)
20) --> Black Dwarf Step==> EndRdx(20)
20) --> Black Dwarf Antagonize==> Acc(20)Acc(37)Taunt(42)Taunt(46)
---------------------------------------------


The 4 slots pre lvl6 would go into Dark Nova Blast/Bolt as Dmg and into Dwarf Drain as a heal and a end red.

* Do we really need 3 tohit buffs in Nova? The way I see it the 3rd only adds a 2% buff benefit...and isn't that 2% of 75% so it's only 1.5% more acc?

* The heavy recharge slotting in dwarf is to keep me moving, not sure it's required so much if hasten is up most of the time. Only got hasten single-slotted until I respec, so it's hard to tell.

* As I'm AoE focussed, not sure if it's worth 3 slotting the two single-target nova attacks, maybe it's worth redirecting them?

Note: Forgot to add a dmgres to Eclipse, I'd correct that in the final build.

My shade's fairly heavily biased towards nova, though I've slotted dwarf enough to get a decent attack chain when hasten's not running. Human form is barely slotted at all, except Sunless Mire and Extract Essence.

I use human form merely for the odd hold/disorient while self-healing and summoning pets or making corpses explode, then back to nova and blast away.