Lewisite
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Posts
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Joined
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Maybe I did, or maybe not. Its academic anyway.
I'm interested though in what you mean by " manage your primary". That's all rather vague... I've had a poison mm since the day villains came out, and I understand the numbers fine. It seems to me the sets single target nature and the high debuff resistance of stronger mobs means it just does less and offers little in the way of mitigation. -
Quote:Don't you L2P jerks belong on a certain games Klingon forums? what a rude and nasty childish little sentiment. You can't possibly disagree with a modicum of Grace and gentlemanly behaviour?Originally Posted by Briarpatch
I totally agree with you! Poison is the worst secondary for repairing a massive amount of damage to poorly managed pets.
Now if you actually learn how to use an MM primary outside of leaving all pets in defensive, something many MMs seem reluctant to do, then you may find, with practice, that /Poison is right at the top of the heap with /Dark and /Traps.
There is nothing about suggesting some new tactics that requires that kind of attitude.
Why don't you apologize for your poor behaviour and reply with some useful advice. -
Honestly, */Poison is easily the worst secondary.
It still has a reputation but it hasn't been deserved for a long time. Its a very weak set that will leave you a lot weaker than many stronger MM builds. The stronger enemies in the game will not be significantly weakened by your poison debuffs. Even if you six slot your debuffs, any difficulty higher than standard will render them ineffective. Envenom and Weaken don't do anything noticeable to challenging enemies like named mobs -- the results will be they'll AoE one-shot all your ninjas and leave you high and dry since poison comes with absolutely no defenses at all.
Noxious gas is the only good power, and when its not up your mostly useless... also with Ninjas your T3 pet isn't melee, which means you'll end up having to micro it to get it to work as best as it can.
Ditch poison, replace it with anything but trick arrow. Traps or Dark are generally pretty sweet on anything. -
lol, yeah. That'd be awesome.
If we can't get them to change a single power then there isn't a lot of chance for anything that major ;( -
Well. The "Cottage Rule" is a bunch of crap. It makes sense for powers that are occasionally useful to some players. It makes no sense for powers that are complete garbage.
Serum and Poison/Poison Trap come to mind. Could ANYONE, ANYWHERE, at ANY TIME EVER complain if those got replaced with something even occasionally useful? No.
Game developers have got to be the most stubborn people in the universe. NCSoft makes a lot of good changes but on some points (such as these) they are just wrong headed and seem to have decided that they just will not listen. This thread is quite old, and its still alive. That itself means something.
I'm with Negate here, but I think 2012 is probably too soon. We have to wait for all the people at NCSoft to die of old age and get replaced by younger people who are perhaps a little more responsive. They are probably about my age overall, so, if I eat healthy and stay fit I might get a year or two of decent Mercs before I kick off.
That said, the NCSoft guys should feel free to prove me wrong.
*hint hint*
EDIT: Maybe I sounded more angry than I really mean too, obviously I love the game and I love what NCSoft is doing with it. They just need to make an exception to their rules for Mercs and perhaps one or two other powers. -
Anyone had this issue? I have a Nerco/Dark .. when I zone sometimes my pets just stay where they are and don't follow, if I dismiss them.... they acknowledge the command but don't actually go away. If I resummon the ability begins to recharge but no pets appear. Re-logging doesn't actually seem to fix the problem. They are there but don't actually do anything at all, not even attack nearby mobs or whatever.
Anyone else? -
Everyone agrees Mercs are basically a bad primary. My main for the longest time was Mercs/Poison -- even slotted out with purples and basically everything you can imagine he's very much weak compared to my other MM's. I just wish the Devs would hook us up already, they've been bad since they day they came out.
There really isn't going to be a situation where some players are going to complain about a favorite ability not being there or something. There are no good abilities in the Mercs tree. Everyone knows this.
Actually, as a comment -- I find it irritating too that my Mercs don't have any leadership abilities, but thugs do. That makes thugs more logical for a military unit than Mercs. It makes no sense. Surely at least one of these guys is an officer of some kind right? Officers should leadership stuff. I think my biggest complaint about Mercs is they have such poor survivability. They get no defensive powers at all, no way to keep them in the fight. Even if you go with something like Traps that just brings them up to mediocre. Lots of Mercs/* builds are missing a rechage intensive pet so they can't stack up the defensive procs too.
Replace Serum with a recharge intensive pet (like a flier maybe?), and tweak the abilities of the Mercs as very well discussed already in this forum. Thats my two cents. ;P -
Honestly, the fact is the /Poison quite weak. Its very special purpose, and its complete lack of anything defensive seems to get you into trouble with little way out. You can play at a fairly high +1 mob level, but numbers are going to spell trouble. Small groups you can do pretty well.
/Poison shows itself very well when your in a group, though, where there are other people around to take the inevitable agro. It looks like the set will really benefit from the enhanced debuff incarnate slot. -
I'd love to see poison get some love, its so niche that its actually pretty useless for most stuff, its by leaps and bounds the weakest of all the sets. its also the only set that really only works at all with a few primaries. lol, they couldn't make it worse
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lots of things go with traps. I'd say bots and thugs go best because you can soft cap the defence of you minions. that's obviously pretty sweet. bots traps mm's can soft cap pretty much everything, thugs traps mm's can at least softcap smashing lethal and energy.... thugs will do a little more damage than bots, bots are a little more rugged.
I have no idea what demon summoning is with traps though, might be good though -
the sad thing about Mercs is that we all agree they need to be tweaked, we did when the set first came out, and we have generally agreed on how so. really its not much to fix up the set!
make the medic heal a little better, give the spec ops stealth strike and lower recharge on a few abilities like tear gas, lower recharge on full auto burst and lrm rocket for commando..
make serum last two minutes and make it a weaker aoe buff - or replace it with a floating turret.
and that's it they could do that in an afternoon probably. no one is ever going to miss serum as it is, lol!
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Quote:bots are reliable, they just feel plain to me. I lean towards mercs but I'm pretty sure you cantt get their defense up enough to be useful even with traps and the uniques. I have a mercs/poison (bleh!) and a thugs/storm both at 50, both slotted very well...Originally Posted by ultrawatt
I like Bot/dark more, but thats just me. You got a lot of debuffs and one of the best self heals out there(and you kind of get it twice cuz of the dark pet). My /dark can get AVs down to about 30% tohit and about -50% dmg for most of the battle and up to -90% dmg every once and awhile.
I think merc could prolly be really good as you can slot the -res proc in them but ive never tried that out.
and honestly the mercs seem to trash the thugs at high level content. I'm guessing achilles heel + lady grey add up real fast the way they open up on targets fully upgraded. at lower levels or without proper slotting thugs do win out - but its all just smashing/lethal with a touch of fire. mercs its all debuffing the whole time. I don't think a lot of people get mercs all the way to the pointy top all that often to truly see their potential. that said, they are resistance based and there isn't really a way to softcap deff (and its all or nothing when it comes to Avs.). a set that adds resists suits them best - but enough to really deal with an av? I'm probably going to make that mercs/Pain with the perma/haste and see how it works. I'll have to double check a few things on the build before i go through the trouble of getting him off to 50 though
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Quote:lol, I think he is pulling your leg. I have a poison mm and you cannot get their tohit down anywhere near that low, and the set doesn't offer much in the way of defences. its incredibly weak as a rule.Originally Posted by Kiwi
My brother told me about his use of Ninja/Poison to solo AV's, and how he used to laugh as the tohit debuff coupled with some defence stopped him and his ninjas getting hit and the -res and high single target damage allowed him to take their health down fast.
Also a well built Bots/Traps should be able to work well.
also I find ninjas to be pretty bad as a set as well, even with their high damage.... I'd go give him a noogie, an Indian rugburn or possibly even a Polish bike ride.
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interesting, I had the same feeling. of course, mace mastery gives actual defense to s/l/e instead of resistance which I suspect is of only passing use. there is going to be an issue of the enemy regenerating gobs of health.. not sure what should really be ideal here.
do you think its important that the pets actually soft cap? it sounds like they are hopefully out of troubles way while you go rip into mister big shot.
I'm still rolling mercs (debuffing), pain (heal+regen) with perma-haste.. but its rather expensive to test a theory
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no replies! that can only mean the build is perfect and cannot be improved by the likes of mortal man huzzah!
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A fixed version of Mercs
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Hi Fellas,
I've been playing around with some uber builds here, mostly for my own entertainment really. Seems to me there is a few ways to go about this... but what characteristics do you think are most important for fighting the most powerful enemeis in this game?
I'm already 100% sure we are talking ranged pets so thats Mercs, Thugs, Robots. Should I be looking at a high def character? (Like Bots/Traps, or Thugs/Traps?) is regeneration really useful, say, a character with perma-haste pain domination? I don't feel that the primary is necessary important, Mercs can be configured to do some genuinely mean debuffing, thugs can do great straight up (if generic) damage... Bots are usually reliable but it seems to be they are a little bit wasted on single target damage. Is resistance helpful much?
What do you guys think would work best? I'm leaning towards high-def since on paper it looks like it should work well, but, thats on paper. For example, I've got builds for a Thugs/Trap that softcaps S/L/E on himself and everything on his minions, a bots/traps that softcaps everything on himself and his minions (er, maybe not the protector bots), and a mercs/pain that manages to pull off perma/haste better then you might expect. Wonder how well Painbringer+Serum would really work.. you'd need to feed him a few blues but as long as you had them...
No one suggest poison, its useless on the genuinely nasty.
Cheers! -
eh? the elemental apps suck because they only work for certain themes of characters... and they are intensely boring none of them really appeal to me, disappointing. but I'm pretty shocked to hear you think Mm's have trouble in mayhem missions? I think we rock them hard core, lol! they are so easy maybe not play on +4x8
seriously, it sucks we don't get the only interesting blaster app, but in my opinion... mm's are better tankers than tanks and brutes, better corrupters than corrupters, better controllers than controllers... I can't complain to loud - its just that cox makes it really hard to have characters follow a theme if not impossible a lot of the time and mm app would have given me one more good option for tech or natural themed characters. -
Hi fellas,
I've decided upon a Thugs/Traps build here, because it looks like I can tweak up some decent defense (I'm fond of defense, but for some reason I can't get into bots). I'm not 100% sure, but I think I've soft capped my pets defenses here, if somewhat barely And my MM gets Smashing/Lethal/Energy softcapped. There are some holes in the defense regarding negative energy and elemental stuff, but otherwise it seems pretty solid... but, that said, there are some smart people floating around this forum and I'd like their advice!
TIA! Cheers
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[QUOTE=The_Coming_Storm;3148130]Here's mine. Mercs/Traps. You don't need medicine :P
I see we like our Mercs builds to be fairly similar -- we both like to take personal attacks (I don't with every MM primary, but with Mercs I sure do, more dakka dakka!), we both think Invisibility on an MM is less than useless and we like Provoke.
Interesting build, looks good in some ways. OMG, you took Serum, and slotted brawl Here is what I would do to... I'd drop Serum, I'd rather replace Dark Embrace with Charged Armor, I prefer its straight up SLE resists. I'd replace all the flying stuff, I find that enemy groups with lots of control tend to make MM's very pwnt fast, especially Malta. Combat Jumping + Acrobatics handles that nicely. Nothing more annoying then watching your MM get widdled away while you are helpless.
Some neat stuff in there, worth integrating into my own bias's
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Quote:Actually, yes. Poison as an entire secondary is totally crap. Ugh, bunch of annoying expensive single target rubbish. I know, I've had my Mercs poison since the first day CoV came out. I kept thinking he was gonna be good at any second, but he never did.Originally Posted by Red Pirate Boggarts
Put me down in the traps column too (I'm in love with traps, rolled a thugs/traps MM with a Destroyers theme in Praetoria, good times).
Really though, I don't think you can go wrong with storm, dark, or traps. Only secondary I don't really recommend is poison. I rolled a ninja/poison and hated the single target focus on it. Mercs aren't all that sturdier than ninjas either.
Well, really, I took him into some PvP and he did pretty well --anyone that came up to him ended up running away in pretty short order. But, being an MM, they got away most of the time Mercs/Poison is a good PvP build in my mind, but its hopeless for PvE content.
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If your talking about the soulbound allegiance "chance for buildup" proc, its not just good for Mercs/Thugs, its required. Its the bomb diggity. But it has to go in Commando/Bruiser, if I understand this correct, it won't work on SpecOps and Soldiers because *they* aren't actually level 50, only the 3rd tier pet is.
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hmmm, some pretty good ideas in here actually. I forgot that dark has stuff that works with resists. might be worth playing around with the numbers to see what I can come up with. too bad mids won't show you the totals on your pets, lol.
I'll muck around tomorrow and see if I get anything I can dig.
cheers fellas -
yeah, the problem with mercs is that they have absolutely no defences and no way to improve their resists. poor mercs always suffer as a result. their advantage of wicked debuffs is over shadowed by their inability to absorb damage. even with something beefy like pff their fairly squishy. I'll run some of the numbers on storm but I'd wager its still fairly weak
wish the devs would revisit mercs and tool them up a bit!
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Quote:A buddy of mine did exactly this and it worked just fine. I don't think there is actually any difference at all from the vendors perspective about these, your bank can offer you a "secured" creditcard and thats actually almost identical. Pre-paid cards are still mastercards and they work just like them, except you pump them full of money first. So they aren't really "credit" cards, but a compatibility toolOriginally Posted by XXXX
I seem to be having this problem too, in lieu of the time cards I went ahead and bought a copy of the game for $20 thinking the serial code in there would give me a month of play since that's all I wanted at first. Little did I know this was "bonus time" that gets tacked onto my account after I pay for a month, but can I even do that? no...I can't. And why? because the damn cards are nowhere to be found!
Has anyone (in Canada) tried to pay with a pre-paid Mastercard from Money Mart and succeeded? Please tell me if this would work cause I'm not going to put money on the card if NCSoft doesn't accept those, that would just be a waste of yet more money.....