Grey Pilgrim

You could... go play it whenever you want? No ones making you join Voodoo's redside stuff! Or is he?

With those, they actually run in a somewhat smart way... they move back a distance and then use their ranged attacks on you. Not really that dumb, if you think about it. I think that behavior makes sense... it's just that players experience it on top of regular mobs running willy-nilly, which makes it seem part of the same annoying behavior.

Yeah, that has always made sense to me, and that consistently happens. So I can understand that part of the AI Castle was describing. The same behavior from an AV, even con foes, or foes slightly above your ability, however... it should not always happen. Especially for AVs, as I have said.

Diabolique is supposed to do that, which is a little frustrating and why so many of us hate her. But at least the behavior is consistent when she throws up PFF when her health goes low, and she does come back eventually (as with the Cabal, it would be less annoying if this made her genuinely different from most fights). The bigger problem is with other AVs and EBs that shouldn't do this, like Ghost of Scrapyard, or even Romulus. I know they aren't supposed to run all over, as they don't most of the time when I face them. So when Romulus suddenly decides to run all over the map, that's pretty lame and not a good thing.

Most people like SoW and OWtS because they don't have a crash. You can't increase the recharge, but other Tier 9s like Unstoppable can't be made perma, either. The recharge is purposely put too high to do so. And with the non-crash ones, you can still increase the defense or resistance they offer... so you CAN modify those powers as you see fit, just not the recharge.

HoB is just different. It still hits a lot of stuff and does a lot of aoe damage... haven't noticed too much issue with it.

What, they couldn't see the huge flight of arrows from Fistful of Arrows? Or the big explosion from Explosive Arrow? Or the splash of fire from Blazing Arrow? Or the massive patch of arrows sprouting around and in all their enemies from all your powers, but especially Rain of Arrows? Must be blind!

Personally, I love the "thwip, thwip, thwip," of the set. Might be for everyone, though.

*sighs* This is what alternate animations are for, and why you should post in Castle's thread about this. As I've pointed out there and elsewhere, if they had more straightforward animations on the attacks, we'd be hearing people ask for more gun fu animations: you just can't please everyone, which is why more options are a good thing.

Piercing Rounds is kind of goofy, but it's pretty cool, too. But I also liked the more straightforward animations for the three attacks in the Masterminds Thugs set.

But we can guess that they were animating it before that trailer came out! We had dibs!

It does remind me of it as well... actually part of what made me think I should give the set a go, as it looked interesting. I'm glad I did, as it's fun so far.

Note that some people may avoid Ice because of its look or how it plays, same for Fiery Aura. Same for any set. Some people like Willpower and play it, and it's hardly an unbalanced set. You can have powers without characteristics, pros, or cons, but then they'd all be the same and boring.

Yeah, I've made that mistake before. Formed an ITF "for the money" one 2XP weekend to get more XP, influence, and drops, advertised it that way, then had someone complain that we were going too slow by pretty much wiping every map. Which I had advertised and noted at the start of the ITF, too. Oy. We reminded them of the setup, but they quit very fast after we beat Rommy and did not say anything like goodbye.

I can understand wanting to read the dialogue, too, but... even with Praetoria and it's good amount of dialogue and info from your contact between missions, it shouldn't take two minutes to read through it. I know I can speed read a bit since I read a lot, but still... I might be confused why it was taking two minutes as well.

KB is really annoying in Praetoria. Seems like a lot more of the mobs in the lower levels do it than in CoH or CoV. My Elec Brute is dreaming of 16 and a Karma KB IO to help him out. My blaster too.

Oy... and my Kin Scrapper is DA. There's another recipe I have to scrounge up, and fast. Darn Destroyers like playing ping pong with my guys, it seems like.

Debuffs do affect aggro. I can't recall the formula (really should save it somewhere), but I'm sure Aett or one of the other more knowledgeable types around here can fill it in for us. So, I don't remember how much it helps, but it does help on top of damage, etc.

Huh, interesting about the ranges. I think many attacks do have different gauntlet radii (think usually harder hitting attacks are bigger), and that it might be helpful if you're really worried about aggro. Though thinking about what next attack to use can be issue enough if you're just attacking around, trying to defeat something, or maintain aggro. Not sure I want to get gauntlet auras into the mix.

I wish I could point to a post with this, but I'd almost swear this is in the description of how tips work somewhere, or in a dev post. I got it from somewhere, and I don't think it was just Zombie Man's guide (and a lot of that was copying official stuff, I think).

Hippeh, you might be right about the +20 thing, as you can't run them until 20 anyway. Not sure. I find it more advantageous to have it drop in my regular missions anyway, but it's not like there's a dearth of grays you could get in the 20-50 range.

He was also kind of responding to the HP increase thing I was talking about. And we were talking about increasing the cap, not the base (I think they're probably okay since their increase a few issues back... I actually didn't have a high level Stalker there and hate to think how easy it was for him to lose HP then... now I have enough time to pop a heal or react when my defenses don't save me at least).

Anyway, the reason I mention the cap is that other Stalker players have mentioned it in those forums, and I agree. If you pick up WP or Regen for a secondary, you might as well not bother with health bonuses from IO sets (if you get the accolades as well). Stalkers should all benefit from getting +hp to a certain point, and I don't think giving an appropriate nudge upward to the cap would be out of line.

I think they do pretty good ST damage, too. Though that extra chance to crit from surrounding teammates should probably get bigger... 30 feet is pretty small in game terms... I've noticed a lot of powers like that are pretty cramped, even though it usually behooves ranged players to be more than 30 feet back from their opponents.

You keep suggesting that FA needs detriments, like those of us against the KB hole think it should have no detriments. It's supposed to be a more offensive set, so it should reflect that for sure (which is why the new changes were merited, as it was not really doing the offense it was supposed to). It is most certainly less survivable than other sets as well, which is its detriment (not the KB hole... that is added on top of it). It doesn't have a +HP function, defense to stack on, and while its resists are nice, they only do so much.

Even if you took away the KB hole, FA would still have balance and "detriments." The KB hole is going over and above those detriments, making the set even weaker. And again, nothing about the set warrants having a KB hole on top of those weaknesses.

And I'm glad you like Fiery Aura. I like it too. I've been playing it since I joined the game in its first month (and this was before learning that Burn was all that and a bag of chips... I've never found the idea of dumpster burning to be all that fun). This has everything to do with balancing the set, however.

I'm not even touching your interesting flaw comment. Most people despise being knocked back in this game, and the way it's set up, being knocked back is certainly a weakness: especially for a melee AT. Fiery Aura would be perfectly interesting and have its own style if it had the KB hole filled.

Go ahead and like it if you want, but the majority of people don't like being knocked back. You're a bit beyond the pale on that one.

I think numerical balance is important, but people do seem to forget this aspect of the game. Each of the melee ATs feels different and plays different (I'm even adjusting my Tanker style of playing with the new Bruising effect on the Tier 1 power). Some people are going to like one style more than another. With me, I usually avoided Brutes before as I just don't like being a villain. I like the new moral choice stuff, but villainside was not as enjoyable for me. I also don't seem to like Defenders, whereas some people just love theirs. To each their own, and that does affect what people will play to some extent.

3-4 seems to be it for most sets (including your Nova style attack). I know it's a little crazy, but I actually dropped Flamethrower on my AR Blaster, as I needed more ST damage from time to time when soloing (I grabbed the Snipe... just to start things off well against a hard target or drop an annoying Sapper). Between M80, Buckshot, and Full Auto, that was more than enough for me. After that point, I needed to focus on ST damage to drop the boss, etc.