Kruhl_Sentru

I haven't been able to find much about this, so I thought I'd just post a relatively quick question. To preface, I have a lvl 50 katana/super reflexes scrapper that has worked rather well for me, but I'm having a bit of trouble with my lore pets. I know I have wanted them to be Cimerorans, due to the incredible damage output by comparison to other sets and due to the effectiveness of their healer pet, but I'm unsure as to whether I should focus on having damage oriented pets or whether I should go the healer pet route. I already have the tier 3 power that gives a boss and lt. to fight for me, but the lt. dies in a hurry and the boss doesn't usually last much longer. Of course, I'm also using them when soloing on +0x8 versus rikti repeatables, as that is my prefered method of farming for purples, so I'm not sure if they just aren't very good in that area or what.

In any case though, they question pretty much is this: should I get pets that deal tons of damage, or pets that can keep me alive via healing?

And thanks in advance for your help, as always. =)

P.S. Just to throw this in, I have soft-capped defense, and I am going for musculature alpha for more damage, reactive interface for yet more damage, ionic judgement to help in case of adds, and ageless destiny in order to keep my endurance up, otherwise I still go through quite a few blues in a mission. Hopefully that'll give enough information to get things going.

Bleh, only made it through page 5 of this thread, but I did want to echo something I saw barely mentioned in this thread: we could really use something to replace Confront. The only real reason for that power is so that we have something to skip in my experience...

However, I'd like to explain my line of thinking a little. And by a little, I probably mean a wall a text, but here goes: Tankers are meant to tank for the team, and they do it well. Brutes are decent secondary tanks, but still can't match up to a Tanker in raw tankability, which really shows itself in incarnate trials and the like. They make up for this by being able to deal decent damage too, but they have to really work for it, seeing as how they have some pretty pathetic base damage. In fact, because of the mechanics of the game, they also get substantially less benefit than other archetypes do from damage boosts. In othere words, if you fulcrum shift a scrapper and a brute at the same time by the same amount, the scrapper gets alot better damage than the brute.

Scrappers are second only to some blaster builds in damage output, but unlike blasters have a little survivability thrown in to keep them going in melee. This means that solo, they can take on some pretty tough challenges, and in a team, the AoEs that get thrown out generally aren't enough by themselves to take down the scrappers. Stalkers are a two-fold class: PvE and PvP. In PvE, which honestly is all I care about anyways in this particular game, they are the masters of single target damage. The problem is, on a team, you generally need to have a decent amount of AoE as well, which most Stalker attack sets lack in exchange for Assassin's Strike. They have similar defenses to that of a scrapper, but they get Placate instead of a single target taunt (Confront). In PvP... well, lets just say there's a reason people tend to make sure they can see through stealth if they PvP much. Owch.

That being said the combination of giving scrappers a single target taunt and a x3 aggro multiplier (most ATs are x2, tankers and brutes are x4) roughly translates into saying that scrappers are a secondary tank. That worked when tankers and scrappers were hero side, and brutes were villain side, but now with the combined AT list, that means scrappers are what, tertiary tanks? That just doesn't make sense at all imo. I say drop the aggro multiplier to x2 and switch out confront for something a bit more melee damage oriented, and we're set. We scrappers already deal great damage, and can live long enough to tell about it. In fact, in practice scrappers will almost always out-damage a brute, all due to the mechanics of damage boosts.

For those who are unfamiliar with the damage boosting mechanics by the way, as I understand it what happens is that you get a boost to your base, unenhanced damage output only. That's why build-up, for example, tends to fade a bit late-game. Instead of doubling your damage (or an 80% increase or what have you), you get roughly half of that in actualy damage. You probably will have all your attacks at least 3-slotted for damage, so once SOs kick in, you already have almost a 100% damage boost on all the time (effectively). Brutes, therefore, even at 100 fury, are only receiving a 100% damage increase, not a full 200% as might be thought by looking at the raw "real numbers". This also means that while a 100% damage boost given to a scrapper is actually a 50% increase, for a brute at 100% fury its only a 25% increase, which is why brutes almost never outdamage a scrapper, especially when teamed with any support types that boost damage of their allies.

Now that that's out of the way, I do want to say that having taunt abilities is often actually detremental to a scrapper. As a scrapper on a team, I tend to go out and find the biggest, meanest, nastiest enemy around, and trash him. That's easy enough normally, but on a team there's going to be problems with aggro - thus why we also get defense, that way we actually live through pissing off that +4 boss. But, tankers who either haven't taken taunt, or who have yet to taunt that part of the group (remember, taunt only hits 5 targets max), cannot hold aggro away from a scrapper. Tankers only generate about 33% more aggro than a scrapper, but do substantially less damage. This is one area where brutes can help, actually, as they can come close enough with rage to scrapper damage to make use of their 33% more aggro generation. Unfortunately, what this all means is that, for example, my titan weapons/electric armor scrapper, who does insane AoE damage, pulls aggro off of all but the best of tankers.

The fact is, scrappers may have once been something akin to a secondary tank hero side, but these days they are tertiary in that area. Their damage output is where they shine, and in my opinion the developers need to re-evaluate whether scrappers should really be a tertiary tank with decent damage, or maybe those bonuses to taunting need to be taken away and replaced with something more oriented to dealing tons of melee damage and living through the plethora of AoEs they take by being in the fray, not to mention the occasional ST attack. In any case though, I'm not about to say that scrappers are inferior in any way, but they do indeed need a tweak or two, albeit probably not in the area that the original poster had in mind.

Glad to see I'm not the only one with these problems. I deleted 2 of my characters on the Virtue server last night, and last I checked it still hasn't gotten me back my slots for it. However, I think I was a little less worried about it after finding out 2 things: this happens when the store is down, and the store is having alot of issues right now (as can be seen by the stickied post). In either case though, I filed a ticket about it, and I would recommend others doing the same if only to bring more attention to the problem at hand.

On the bright side, maybe I'll actually get around to playing the characters I already have instead of making hordes of new ones lol.

I just got back to my house and found out that the problem has been fixed. Apparently a complete re-install of the game, time consuming though it may be, was the solution. My best guess from talking to the family member was that they canceled in the middle of the patch, which somehow messed things up. Still not sure why my own computer overheated today, but for all I know it's just a dust clog.

Thanks for the reply though, I'll have to remember that CoHHelper if I run into any more trouble.

Since the patch today (Oct. 5th), a family member's game keeps crashing when it loads up the downloader. From the looks of it, the error is happening when it gets to the "Verifying Image" stage. All the error says, unfortunately, is "cohupdater.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.", without any further explanation. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be causing this and/or how to fix it?

As a side note, my own computer had to be shut down for a bit due to the video card overheating after today's patch, though it seems to be fine now. This makes me wonder if something is wrong with today's patch.

Just a simple question, does anyone know of a way to record a video in City of Heroes?

I have a level 42 dark miasma defender, and I slotted up my tar patch with slow enhancements, bringing the slow component from 90% slow to 177% slow. However, I'm not sure that actually does anything. It doesn't seem from my perspective to make a noticeable difference in how much it slows down enemies that it worked on before, and it still can't touch warwolves.

So, my question is, what exactly is the purpose of slotting slow enhancements, and is it worth it on tar patch?

Okay, I'm not going to go through and read this whole argument, but I did want to put in my 2 cents.

At lower levels, get 2 acc, 2 rech, and either 2 heal or 2 tohit debuff (your choice). Combine with haste for perma use, and you're fine.

Here's my projected high-level slotting:

Touch of Nictus: Heal/Rech
Touch of Nictus: Acc/Heal
Siphon Insight: -Tohit/End Redux/Rech
Siphon Insight: Acc/-Tohit
Siphon Insight: Acc/Rech
Siphon Insight: -Tohit

This'll give you:

78.55% Acc (Yes it's high, but I hate missing +4 mobs on mothership raids. =P )
21.20% End Redux (Just an added bonus really)
53.00% Heal (His heal isn't just bigger than yours: it's a heck of a lot more powerful at it's base. On teams, this added heal is just plain awesome.)
73.78% Rech (Not exactly as high as it can be, but combined with haste and set bonuses, I'm reading a base recharge time of 190.5s with haste, and 259.7s w/o haste, versus a 240s duration. The end result is that you're pushing his limitations a bit, but I find that he can live through most anything anyways.)
51.93% -Tohit (Again, not max, but it's in exchange for some awesome healing, and it's pretty dang close to max. Besides, when's the last time you saw fluffy actually target his -tohit buffs on a good target?)

Plus the set bonuses:
1.88% HP
4% Run/Fly/Jump Boost
2% Debt Prot
9% Acc

The overall result is a heal that's about as good as yours but with a much bigger healing radius, enough recharge to get by, a 9% global accuracy boost, and some pretty rocking -tohit benefits.

Yes, this does require taking haste, and putting it on auto. Yes, this does mean random flaming hands. But, you have to ask yourself: Do I want to eek out that last bit of power? Or do I want to look slightly cooler? If you're like me, you want power, and thus you'll need to be taking the hit and taking haste.

Of course, with 3 pages of arguments, I'm sure you could have put this all together by now, but I just really wanted to put in my 2 cents. Besides, it never hurts to have too much useful information in my opinion. Then again, you're talking to a natural analyst. =P

I'd go with natural personally, namely because natural gets access to gadgets, sort of like batman or some such. Since the ninjas aren't robotic or cybernetic, they are pretty clearly natural. As far as SO's are concerned, tech gets cybernetics if I remember right, and natural gets "techniques", so if there are no cybernetics then the concept really leans towards natural with some natural/tech gadgets.

As for Chi, that seems to be a bit more magically oriented, though it could concievably be natural as well. Also, if your character isn't entirely human, don't forget that natural also covers any powers you get from not being human. In the end, though, it's really your call, as you are the one making and playing the character.

Hmm... I'm not really experienced with necromancy much, but my experience so far with pain domination has been that it's far from boring. In fact, it's really kept me on my toes. However, if you find that at the upper levels your guys are just not keeping you busy enough, my suggestion is just to up the difficulty. For example, my 46 bots/dark MM runs at lvl -1/x6, and I can do x8 at -1 lvl pretty effectively when my bots aren't pulling 3 groups at a time. I do turn down the difficulty a tad for EB fights, but that's mostly because I've met too many EB's that love to run all over the place, and even then it ends up being overly easy, and thus boring.

So, if your problem with it being too boring is that it's too slow or easy, I'd suggest just turning up the difficulty a few notches.

As for moderate cost builds, I just suggest toying around with Mid's Hero and Villain Designer for a while. I'd give more advice, but I'm fairly new to pain dom and I've never gotten into necromancy much. At this point, I'm not even sure that my usual strategy of taking assault, tactics, and vengeance is a viable one, what with the high end cost of pain domination. What I do know is that ninjas/pain never leaves you with a dull moment lol.

So, virtue server crashed earlier today during a Hami raid, and just now it crashed during a mothership raid. My guess, is that this is related to any time a sizeable number of people are in one zone at once.

...

Which kinda happens alot...

...

Can we get this fixed now?

Several times now when I've zoned from one city zone to another with my mastermind pets out, I get a bug where my pets stop responding to any commands, including the dismiss command. If I go through a door or zone again they will appear next to me, but they will not follow, fight, dismiss, or obey any commands whatsoever. So far the only fix I've found is to log out for a sufficient amount of time, which needless to say is very annoying. In fact, the reason I'm on the forums right now is because I'm waiting for my MM to reset while logged out so I can play him again.

Anyways, I checked the first couple of pages here and haven't found anyone mentioning this bug. If any of you have seen this bug as well, it might help the devs see the seriousness of the problem if more people mention it.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, though it seems I forgot to mention some things when I posted late last night. Those 4-5 slots I mentioned having open was actually after I had already taken swift, health, stamina, and haste. I do take haste, but I leave it on auto, and I forgot to mention stamina namely because I never, ever skip it.

Also, as a side note, this is actually my second high level blaster, my first is now a lvl 50 AR/Devices blaster that I pretty much never use because I felt that the lack of either aim or buildup was simply too much of a hinderance. That blaster was pretty much proof to me that you didn't have to have an optimal build to be effective enough to reach lvl 50.

I've recently been working on a DP/MM blaster, and have been having quite a bit of fun, but I've been running into a bit of a problem. Namely, I don't know the blaster archetype well enough to know if there are any really good options for power pool powers.

Between skipping some of the powers I don't care for, and using ninja run as a travel power (it works well enough for me and I'm usually stingy on powers), I have a few slots open. Even with elec mastery that I plan on going for, I'm going to have 4 to 5 extra powers to choose from.

To give an idea of what I'm looking for, I'm basically designing myself to be able to pump out some serious AoE dps, with 6 different AoEs to cycle through (empty clips, bullet rain, hail of bullets, psychic scream, psychic shockwave, and static discharge, for a total of 3 cones, an AoE, and 2 PBAoE's (you'll notice I'm skipping piercing rounds as it rarely can hit enough targets to be worth the animation time)). Even at level 30 I'm already able to keep up a decent cycle of AoE's when haste is up, so so far it's working quite well.

Other notes about my build/concept: I'm not interested in PvP at all, I doubt I'll have enough money to even finish outfitting myself with rares before I move onto another character, and so far the power pools I've been looking at taking are super speed + stealth IO + recall friend to help stealth mish's, and the medicine powerset to help keep myself and the healers alive.

Anyways, I'd appreciate any ideas as to some good power pools for my blaster, or any idea as to where I can look to find good info on this that has already been said. Thanks in advance.

Bah, so much for that build. Thanks for the info though, I'd have hated to have bought 6+ of those LotG sets only to find out then that it doesn't work.

I was just working on a possible high damage build (fiery melee/super reflexes scrapper) in Mids' Hero and Villain Designer today, and I've noticed that after the first 5 Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed enhancements, Mids' stopped counting any more of the +7.5% recharge speed enhancements. This is a bit confusing, as super reflexes alone has slots for 6 of these, and being that this is a global enhancement it's easy to stack in a few more via power pool powers.

So, my question is, is there an actual in-game cap on how many of these recharge speed enhancements I can get a benefit from, or is there just a bug in the hero designer?

This is rather important to my build, as it makes a difference (after a ton of rare and costly IO's (no super rares though)) of having either a 68.8% recharge speed boost, or a 98.8% recharge speed boost. If the former is the case, in my opinion I'd be better off just taking haste on a different build, as you can easily have that up the majority of the time for an additional 70% recharge speed boost, on top of whatever other IO set bonuses you get.

Does anybody have any ideas about this?

Certain auras don't show up when turned all the way to black. For example, smoke works, but lightning doesn't seem to work at all, and flames produces faint white wisps. Would be nice to see those work someday, as it would be really cool to have a character enveloped in black flames or with black lightning arcing around them.

I was about this close to flipping out and permanently canceling my subscription, until it was mentioned that today is april fool's. You ever think about doing something like that for real, and you can kiss CoX goodbye.