Grey Pilgrim

QR

No competition for me, usually. More than one tank on a team is fine... I just try to make sure we're splitting up the aggro... it's a bit silly when two tanks are standing right next to each other, as they should make sure they're gathering everyone up (arguably the same for the Tankers and Scrappers, partially for AOE damage that SOME scrappers can't handle and partially for aggro). I've had to remind a few other tanks of this, as somehow they'd pile right in next to me, even though mobs often like to clump up in slightly separate groups, out of aura range.

Well, time alone will tell, but I'm fairly sure CP will be replaced with something. Though I'm doubtful of whether that will be a straight out heal. Elec has such great end recovery abilities that I could see that being overpowered by Castle and co. Something like Drain Psyche probably makes more sense, as the regen could be a help. Or maybe a Dull Pain type power. *shrugs* I could be wrong, of course, Fiery Aura does get Consume and Healing Flames, of course. Though I'd be foolish to argue that Consume is better than Power Sink (other than the fact that you can get it much, much earlier).

And maybe it will all just stay the same, heh. You never know.

QR

Yeah, I'm not sure what this is about at all. Willpower has to work a little harder to hold aggro, but I haven't had any issues with my WP Tanker at all... I just place him well, Taunt, and attack. WP is a solid, all around set.

As for the aura thing, there were a few screwy ones for Scrappers at one point, but I thought those were for Invuln, actually. No matter what, them fixing that isn't a nerf... it's fixing a bug. People just love the "n" word, though.

I'm rather tempted to drop an Elec/Elec Tanker and run with a Brute for Going Rogue, then have him sideswitch. Elec is a little weaker for ST damage for Brutes, so it will be for Tanks as well, I would think. I'm thinking having Fury will help get around that more. Plus, then I don't have to worry about main tanking much with him, hehe.

But yeah, I wish they would take out Conserve Power. I put together a Brute build, and it is obviously not necessary with Power Sink and your End Drain resists. Pretty much everyone on the Brute forums recommends not taking it, and it's quite clearly not needed.

Heraclea, I know you love your endurance, but Power Sink comes back every 30 seconds when slotted. That's almost every mob or every other, depending on how fast you're running. It really does feel superfluous to the set, especially without any heal or regen.

Hey, Ace, you think if we ask Back Alley Brawler nicely enough, he'll pony up some alternate War Mace animations to play with? Not that the existing ones stink or anything, but I just love having customization options.

I'm guessing the Super Strength and Martial Arts ones are just the beginning, and I am quite excited.

I was much more impressed with the Cyborg and Magic packs (Valkyrie too, though there is less to that one). Had a lot more costume options and interesting things to it. The game already had a fair amount of goggle and lab coat options, so this wasn't something that screams "buy" to me. Whereas Cyborg has a lot of nifty new armor costumes, and the Magic look is something the game was short on as well.

[ QUOTE ]
No "content" so far, if you want to be a negative nelly...

[/ QUOTE ]

Where's mah content? I want moar content! Joking, of course, but more missions and map types would make this game have much longer legs than just porting around powers. I think the announcement has a lot of nifty stuff, but I am keen on having this game keep going. Not really interested in Champions, which is far too much of the "look what we can do that CoX can't!" And meh, my style would feel cramped by having Superman and others around... I think this new comic world leaves a lot more interesting creativity options. So I'm not keen on DCU, either.

Proliferation has been asked about for a long while, so that's a good thing, should make people happy. I would have been really excited about Elec/Elec going to Tanks, but I'm thinking I want to try that with a Brute that side switches. Weaker resists, I know, but I have plenty of tanks.

What I'm really intrigued by is the alternate animations... I would guess that Martial Arts and Super Strength are only the beginning, which is great. I've been a bit annoyed by how many animations are shared between the powersets for years. No guarantee that the new ones won't be shared as well, but at least these are more options. Anyway, I'm more excited about the alternate animations than I am power coloring... colors mostly work as they are in game.

I wonder how they're going to work about people not liking color changes... will they only be viewable by you? Will buffs revert to standard color when on another players, so we all know what buff is on us? Or will they just be forced on us, and negative nellies be darned?

I didn't think running Sister Arlia's arc was going to throw a hitch in things. I've never done it, and it's actually a good amount longer than "ancient" Posi. A bit too much going back and forth from Cimerora, too.

Anyway, the first hitch was the mission where you try to free Ghost Widow. The second we entered her room, the ambushes would trigger... all at once. I'm guessing we had 2-3 mobs behind us at once, not to mention the mobs in the room with an EB. A bit rough that, so we failed it twice. We moved on from there, though MG called us all wusses for not trying again (okay, he didn't call us names, but he did want to run again). Though he did say lowering the diff on the second was going to make for "easysauce" or something like that, so I'm not too bothered by him saying that.

Then we had issues with new teammates not being able to enter Cim. I left before we could finish the arc, but I think everyone else was joining another team. Hmmmm, did I mention that I had three missions up, couldn't drop one, and found this all out AFTER suggesting running the arc? Silly me. Rough night.

Made it to 42 and a good ways through... having defense from Scorpion Armor makes a great difference... I wasn't getting pasted nearly as much as I used to (also had other def buffs, but it was a good base to get me to the 30s-40s with the other buffs).

As usual, I would participate from time to time if these were run more in the evenings. Of course, my account is going to lapse at the end of July. Not sure when I'll be back as we are moving again (in process right now), and finances are a little tight. I know others are interested in doing SFs, the time is just not right. Could try another night if the time just isn't working on Sunday.

I'll be there as well. Hopefully Hamster budgets for more people arriving late, since that's the trend.

QR

Planning on being there... finished my patron arc so my poor MM can have a little defense and maybe not get hit by every status effect Malta wants to throw at him.

QR

One important bit that I don't think has been stated (sorry if I missed it) is the difference in HP between the two. Tankers have a higher base and can get it higher easier. I forget what the Scrapper cap is off the top of my head, as well. No matter what, I'm quite sure Tankers have a higher cap.

The reason I'm adding that is it DOES make a difference to survivability. Maybe a no-brainer difference between Scrappers and Tankers, but Tankers can better handle the damage that gets through Shield's defenses.

If you've run an SR scrapper and did okay, it shouldn't make a difference. Anyway, just another thing to think about.

My point was more about power picks and attack powers. If Stun is made into an attack like Clobber, it will have a longish recharge, which means I probably would still want to keep those first three powers (if you dropped one of them, you'd feel even more like this was a slow set). I guess you could just dump Whirling Hands from my build (though I like having at least a little AOE, even if it is underpowered), but it still seems like any ST problems Energy Melee has would be better fixed by looking at the powers that are already attacks.

Maybe changing it in the end is easier than monkeying with one of the other ST attacks, but it doesn't seem like it would be.

At any rate, it's pretty clear that most of the annoyance with EM is those that ran with it before not liking what it was changed into. People keep bringing up longish animations like other Tankers don't have long animations to deal with at times, either. Complaining about a target dying before ET goes off is no different than a Blaster complaining they didn't get Rain of Arrows off before the team killed most of the mob. It's all in the timing.

Long animation complaints might have more pertinence to the whole "target dying while animating" discussion if an EM tank on a team didn't have other short animating ST attacks to use when a long animation isn't useful. Or like the Tank doesn't have other responsibilities than just straight damage on a team.

I think EM does need a little loving, but there's way too much unwarranted doom over it. Such behavior is the norm for any forums, though.

Powers like Strength of Will and One With the Shield are hard-coded to be affected by absolutely no recharge. Doesn't matter how you try to reduce the recharge, it won't change the fact that Strength of Will recharges in 300 seconds. Just the way it is. However, like I said earlier, it's balanced out to make it worthwhile. I'm sure some people will support Unstoppable to the death, but I would probably prefer something like Strength of will over the negatives Unstoppable has.

Concept is king in a situation like that. Air Superiority works great for my MA/Regen Scrapper: it provides some nice mitigation, and it looks just fine on a cyborg that has been designed to be a walking "deathbot." He's extremely strong, so it makes sense.

I mean seriously, any MA character taken to 50 is going to have to deal with the idea that they can defeat robots or villains with power armor, just by using the power of their feet. If that can fly with you, you can make AS fly as a concept. Heh.

Would giving Stun the "Clobber Treatment" really help, though? It helped Mace because Mace didn't have hard enough ST damage. The same cannot be said for EM at all, I would say. If you up Stun's damage, you lose the utility of the power (remember how much the stun in Clobber was scaled back when it was given damage), and you're simply given yet another ST power to choose from.

If anything is done to EM, it would make a lot more sense to adjust one of the other attacks. Making ET more like Thunderstrike is interesting, upping Whirling Hand's damage a tad, etc. would make more sense. Or just tweaking the damage up a little bit for ST damage in the set (by adjusting one of the current damage powers) is the way to go, I would say.

Yes, it was fixed precisely so it could not be made perma. It has other nice features, like no big crash, so it's quite nice for that. If they hadn't made it fixed, it would have looked more like Unstoppable for recharge time, etc.

The use of the word "bit" modifies Rube Goldbergian, meaning that while the system developed for CoX isn't as good as it could be, it's not "deviously complex and impractical." No contradiction, but the correct use of a modifier, which you missed.

Are animations breaking slightly a sign that the system isn't robust enough, or simply a sign that it's a computer program, and moving or fixing one thing can sometimes have negative effects elsewhere? I'm thinking more of the latter, but a developer would have to say for sure. The engine seems pretty stable to me, and the worst bugs I've run into are in the annoying category more than anything else.

I do agree that NCSoft has invested a lot, so once the byproducts of that investment are out, how they did will determine the future for sure. Seeing as how GR is probably coming out in the next 12 months, which is the time Arcanaville used, I would say that the statement works. Something REALLY dramatic would have to happen for NCSoft to not put out everything they're working on for CoX.

Hmmmm, then I hope it's shifted to 15 feet. I obviously didn't notice either, but anything to help with tanking, I say.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
And to make this game related.... I think fighting in one of the pools on the floating islands in the shard would be hot.

[/ QUOTE ]

You do realize those are pools and waterfalls of blood, right?

[/ QUOTE ]

blood ewww

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm glad you said ewww. I would have been creeped out if one of you were a vampire.

I know Back Alley Brawler as an NPC foe has way more damage than tanks do, but my Stalker winced whenever he saw the ET windup coming. He's /Nin, so I'm pretty sure it would have taken 99% of his health if it landed. Of course, he could kill me with two hits in a row no matter what, but ET just looked like it was going to hurt. A lot.

Heck, most posters agreed with them (and I assume anyone that looked at the numbers). It was a pretty common thing to hear people quip about how overpowered it was. So when it did come, I was hardly surprised at all.

Anyway, I think part of the problem really is thinking about what it used to be. Heck, some people still talk about the glory days of tanking a whole map, like it wasn't stupidly boring and broken. What people need to do is think about where it's at now, and how it compares. Fire/Fire has some longer animating attacks (FSC is equal to Energy Transfer, Combustion is all of .3 seconds shorter than TF, which is hardly noticeable at that point, Greater Fire Sword is 2.33 seconds, a whole .33 seconds faster than ET), and I know I do fine there. As in, I don't think about how SLOW my Fire Tanker is. The complaint was a slowness perception, so that's what I'm discussing there.

Also, my Ice/Energy Tanker is a lot easier to run solo below 35 as well, as it does pretty well for ST damage even before ET. AOEs are nice, but they're less useful solo or on a small team. Energy also has some nice, fast animating attacks in its first three attacks, which are hardly a waste to use if needed. A brute can fire them off first to build up Fury, then unleash the big one. A tanker can use them to help generate more aggro, just focus on the bosses with the heavy attacks (which are more useful for the squishies as well... a squishy can handle a minion or two on them, but can't handle a boss as well).

Looking at Starsman's charts, Stone does seem a little out of whack, there. You could arguably say that EM isn't quite high enough for ST damage looking at that, but it's hardly doing bad. It's equal to Fire, but Fire is supposed to do a lot of damage, as it doesn't have a bunch of nifty stuns to survive more. I'm not sure how you could improve EM much for ST damage... do you want even more damage and recharge in a bigger attack or lower attack?

As for endurance, EM is what, tied for 3rd out of 9 or so in ST damage? That's not bad and wouldn't need a change, I would say.

I can't recall all the numbers, but a Stealth IO and Cloaking Device is enough to go and stand in front of a boss without them seeing you (unless they have +perception, but there aren't many bosses with that). As far as I know, Cloaking and Smoke Grenade are enough as well.

So that's quite good, I would say. And Cloaking Device doesn't have any movement penalties, either.

Need to be on more Masque and DC teams, then.

Hmmmm, a badly written joke followed by this... I had better run for the hills.