Mephe
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Ok Silas your bible doesnt have Time in it! What gives?! We your followers demand you update the holy book with Time!
So my question is what is a good match with time? DP/Time sounds good because of all the melee action. But I already have a DP/MM blaster. Beam sounds like a bad mix because of all the clicky and targeting. I dont have any Rad attacks toons.... hrm. -
Quote:I use farms as yet another test to see how my toon stacks up (and to grab a few choice bronze rolls!). Can it survive long enough and kill at the correct rate to get non stop candies to eat to stay alive?Originally Posted by Arguss
Indeed. I'm a 45 month vet and just this month leveled my first real farmer, discovered he needed inspirations to run, and subsequently started using them a lot more on all my toons.
It too has also helped me break the bad habit of only eating insps right before I die. Always have 1 row empty and eat em as they come in. It has helped out alot. Its amazing how strong insps are in this game when you think about it, relative to any other MMO out there. -
Another point to consider. Incarnate powers are very strong and help alot when farming.
My non softcapped DP/MM (500 mil build, only confuse purples) was able to complete a fire ambush farm (go till ticket capped) set at 0/6 no bosses without dying multiple times solo (no veng). I had clarion which is useless for farming, so I would imagine a barrier would make it safe at 0/8 no bosses. Bosses off is key because they dont drop fast enough. Lore is nice, but does not survive all that well. Reactive is awesome with all of DPs aoes and helps drop things even faster. Farming for me is all about how fast I can get and consume insperations so you are def and res capped and stay that way.
DP/MM is never gonna be an SS/Fire for farming. If you are going to drop alot of inf for a farming toon I would ask why bother when you can get the best farming toon for pretty cheap. -
Quote:You are correct, that was old info that needed to be pulled out after they changed pets to be immune to +rech.Originally Posted by Local_Man
You recommend a Force Feedback +Recharge proc, indicating that it will allow your Assault Bot to fire its missles more often. You may want to check that, as several issues ago, Pets were made immune to Recharge buffs. I know it does NOT provide any recharge buff to Controller pets, but I haven't tried it on my Masterminds.
Thanks! -
Quote:stalkers are to scrappers what tankers are to brutes. :P (red headed step children!)Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
Right. Even though they got a sizable improvement with being able to Crit on any attack even when not Hidden (which improves the more people they are teamed with) and their AS causing a chance for enemies nearby to become Fear mezzed.
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It is hard to have 4 melee classes with many different primaries and secondaries and make sure they are all balanced across the damage/defense spectrum. I dont envy the dev team one bit there.
But there have been some good changes to both stalkers and tanks that have helped smooth out the damage/def line on the 4 melee toons. Of course IOs and Incarnate powers seem to have blurred the lines a bit.
Ohh and welcome back Ultimus! Bots/Traps are still very strong but the new level 54 content has not been very kind to MMs. Some of the new changes looks like alot that have been fixed (pets now get +3 levels in the trials, massive AOE def/resists on pets), but Apex/Tin mage are still brutal to MMs.
GM and AV hunting is now passe with incarnate powers, if you want to grow your epeen, you gotta get some sub 2 minute times soloing pylons in the rikti war zone. Check it out in the scrapper forums. -
My level 50 just hit level 53 last night. I am able to solo a full Lamba spawn without issue now, I was also able to solo (with insps) a lambda gun (at level 51), I can run like a brute during the crate smashing phase solo and take out crates (and most of the mob around them).
If you want the best damage single or AOE pick a fire/* blaster. Blaze and fireball are just that good. If you want something close but dont want to be a fire blaster, DP is an excellent alternative. The major bonus that DP gets over fire is the crashless nuke that with enough recharge is up every other mob (~35 sec).
Swap ammo is required. Once you get it click fire ammo and always make sure its on. Blasters are so much better at HP debuff that anything else just doesnt seem to work out for us.
For your secondary /MM is highly recomended. Its a newer set and therefore cleans up the junk blasters dont need, and includes things like Drain Psy, that blasters love. This allows you to go with the damage alpha or the recharge alpha instead of the endurance alpha.
Once you get T3 clarion, and reactive with 25% res, 50% DOT, you become a monster damage dealer single target or AOE.
My next step is to take my DP/MM to the ambush fire farm and see how he does. I expect mass death(hopefully not mine!) and alot of tickets.
So to sum up... DP has good single target and AOE damage with fire ammo, but it also has a fast recharge crashless nuke. With IOes, purples and incarnate powers you can become a machine of pure destruction. -
Bug:
Incarnate power: Destiny: Ageless: Radial Epiphany does not add +debuff resistance to the view totals window status tab. -
Quote:I am with hades on this one. Unlocking your tier4 with a single lucky BAF is not what I like (My crab after just a couple of days is now complete because of rares and vr drops). I dont much like random only. I am fine with randoms when gambling, but not random only rewards. I want systems that require you to build things up from scratch.Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
1. I would change the ENTIRE Incarnate system after the Alpha slot.
2. I would make the further powers all based off of either shards or threads and not both.
3. I would allow you to save TF reward merits to cash in for salvage or threads
4. I would use the trials to unlock the slots similar to how you defeat the Trapdoor arc to unlock Alpha.
5. I would have threads/shards drop in normal play. I would have mission ARC completion offer a random chance at salvage. It is MY mission arc I had to work through it and in some cases arcs are longer and harder than TF's.
These things allow for all of the playstyles people like, you can farm trials, you can do mission arcs, you can run TFs and advance. You can solo or team and all of it advances you.
So each completed BAF/lam awards 1 common choice, and 1 emp merit per day per trial. 7 emp merits = 1 rare (same as the weekly notice of the well). 28 emp merits = 1 very rare (1 month = 1 very rare). If you do both every day you earn things at double the rate but thats ok, you are doing twice the work per toon.
1 uncommon = 1 common + 40 threads. No other way to get an uncommon (just like alpha).
I do like the iXP so I would leave that as is, in the future it would be nice if they add 4 new mission arcs that are much harder than trapdoor that does an unlock of a single incarnate power. -
Pretty nice build, I do prefer more aoe attacks like frag grenade and ball lightning, but I like the def of your build so its a nice change up. The only suggestion I would have would be if you got an extra slot pop it into suppression and stick another achiles heel in that for some more AOE res debuff.
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If non pet AOEs are the key it would explain why my crab has in less than 20 total runs gotten 3 VRs and has every power up to tier3. I could get tier4 in all the spots pretty easy if I could get more commons instead of uncommons! But I moved on to my shade to get him all slotted up. His rewards are not as good and I know why. More deaths, less AOE.
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Quote:I concur. I use wireless and sometimes the tower is overloaded so I max out around 300kbps or so. On a 24 man BAF or an 8 man ITF the server is pushing more than 300kbps to me (because my connection cant keep up and after about 20 seconds of falling behind it DCs me). So lets figure it out for a 24 man.... 7.2Mbps per BAF that the server has to push. Lets assume they have at peak 10 BAFs running at any one time per server thats 72Mbps that each server has to push out. Thats alot of data to be pushing out for a single server that also has to handle calculations and AI. If they have multiple servers in the same data center, they could be chewing up a significant amount of total available bandwidth for that center to the internet backbone.Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
I think the main cause behind it all is old and inefficient netcode. That, and the silly amount of data the server has to transfer between clients for not only the mundane stuff like player and npc positions, health stats, powers in use etc; but also costume data, power customisation data, buff data etc, etc. Loads and loads of stuff, lots of it which the old netcode the game was written with never had to handle.
I just don't think they ever updated it, and that's why we now have huge amounts of network lag whenever there's more than a single team on the go. It's still using the old dialup friendly netcode.
Relative to WOW this game probably is pushing out almost 50% more data on average to each client. It may not be a big deal because the population of this game is/was low but those bandwidth costs do add up. Time to hire some network developers to look at the code and clean it up on the client and server, probably will save you money in the long run with reduced bandwidth costs and server loads. -
I have gotten 2 rares, 4 Very rares, 2-3 of each uncommon and 1 common. The only time I got the 10 threads was when I was constantly DCing because my ISP SUCKS!
This is on my crab. The crummy thing is I would much rather get commons than uncommons at this point because I need alot more commons than an uncommon and they breakdown to 1/2 of a common!
When you have every uncommon you need they are the same as getting the 10 thread prize! I wish we could break them down to at least 1 common. -
Quote:I am sorry did you just say MEOW?Originally Posted by Zwillinger
Meow?
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Quote:I was thinking the same thing! If some dude took my hot wife from me I too would start a revolt and burn down the world to get her back!Originally Posted by Bronze Knight
Well now we know exactly why Calvin Scott wants his wife back...
Helan of troy anyone? -
Quote:EVERY SINGLE PUG pocket D BAF that I have been on has invited 24 players first come first served. We have stalkers we have petless masterminds, nobody cares.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
As compared to hard TFs, I don't see even a hint of elitism. Other than wanting one actual tank on the trials and a few controllers for certain parts, people seem to be pretty open to different teammates. Needing so many people seems to push folks into being more open with their selections.
nobody. And its amazing because we still can win as long as people follow some simple direction, which so far has been the case.
When the STF, LRST, ITF, tinmage, and apex came out teams got made with a specific AT loadouts in more cases than not. I dont see that at all with the BAF.
To me this new content is so much better than anything we have had previously that all this talk about solo or only 8 mans is pretty silly. But I do think the next content patch will contain something for the people that for some reason just want to do the old stuff. There is no reason not to other than lack of dev time. -
In wow as the devs wanted the endgame to progress they had to help push the slow earners to make it so they could experience the end game content.
It went like this:
Round 1: Raids for the hardcore. non hardcore could grind heroics to gear up.
(for us we have i19.5 alpha for non hardcore, and i20 for hardcore) You can do BAF and Lamb with unalphaed+ 50s right now, but its pretty hard.
Round 2: Raids from round 1 are too easy for the hardcore. New level of raids added for hardcore. New currency converstions added for non hardcore to assist in gearing up.
(maybe a i21 that makes a new 10 hour shard to thread conversion of 4 shards to 20 threads? so you can buy commons at the same rate)
There has also been a very intersting idea to add an incarnate mode to all of the current level 45+ TFs. The idea is:
- all mobs spawn level 54
- no temp powers
- threads drop instead of shards from mobs
- random common i20 salvage instead of i19.5 specific salvage
- ixp is earned for alpha/judge/reactive in that order but at a reduced rate relative to trials. -
Awesome summary. Some notes of my own
The Good:
Love the raids. Hated WOW raids (1+ hours of making a perfect group and the rest of the time spent failing for no gains is not fun)
Love the new powers.
The bad:
LFG is a complete failure as it is. Prime time on freedom seems like the only trial you can LFG solo into is the lambda without waiting around forever. LFG is a negative feedback loop that is out of control right now. The worse it works, the less it gets used, the worse it works...
The ugly:
Maybe have the same number of components as you have trials. So 2 commons, 2 uncommons, etc. What we have is a bit insane. Costs dont need to change, just less of the same stuff with a different name would be nice. I agree that new currencies are required, just how many different nickles do you really need?
The servers are not able to handle the load. Optimize the code or throw more hardware at it. Hardware is usually cheaper. -
OMG...
Just crafted my tier 3 Rebirth (90 second up time with massive regen). I get a ~600 point heal when I cast it and then I CAP MY REGEN RATE! Yeah with serum I regen 180 hps per second for the first few seconds. And then it drops down to maybe 35 hp/sec or so at the final 30 seconds before its back to normal 18 hp/sec until I can cast it again. But this thing makes me pretty much unkillable from what I have seen. If I could pump out more damage I could solo the ambush spawns on the BAF for all 3 phases! I think with the level jump from lore I just may be able to do that.
As we know the level bumps are huge, i would recomend you spend all your astrals and threads on getting your level bumps before you increase your judgements and interfaces. Probably best to stop at common for both of those until you get to level 53. Your damage and survivability go way up.
My ranking of how much power each incarnate power adds to my VEAT toon:
1 Destiny - game changer at least what I have seen with rebirth/regen. Barrier looks to give close to the same amount of staying power. Level shift is only in the trials, but I understand why.
2. Alpha - Cardiac is huge if you need it (i can tell when the alpha bug shuts it off), and the level shift is also godly. Very close in power to destiny.
3. Judgement - 90 second crashless nuke. Very nice
4. Interface - works with every damageing attack, once the pet bugs with the DOTs are fixed this may be equal to judgement. VEATS lack rain like powers so its not as good as some other classes.
5. Lore - the level shift is more important than the pets. The INV support buffs are pretty weak. And the 33% uptime just feels weak relative to the pets we get. Great for the 5 minute kill the escapees, but not much else. -
Here is the 10k question: Do the INV support pets buffs equate to the lost damage by not getting another damaging pet? Sounds like all the buffs are pretty weak for a 5 minute up 15 minute recharge power.
And remember when you get the level shift that shifts your pets level also, which means nothing to a support pet, but helps out a damage pet alot.
I just dont see how the inv support pets can live up to the +damage and the leuit class damage dealer pets. Treat lore more like a 5 minute nuke instead of a buff. -
LFG needs some help for it to be usefull. The participation rate in the LFG seems to be dropping every day, before long it will be completely unused. Here are some problems and some ideas to make it better:
1. Min size for these trials is too small for a randomly made pug. Set both the lam and baf to 16 min size. Preformed leagues can ignore this min size.
2. Preformed groups fill to max and this prevents pugs from getting added. Make prometheus(move him to pocket D) and the SGBase the contact to start a locked trial. Make LFG leagues cap out at 14 for LAM and 20 for BAF. The last 2-4 spots are reserved for solos in the LFG Q. Add extra rewards for using LFG instead of the contacts to ensure LFG does not go unused.
3. PUG trials seem to always give the one person who goes AFK the league leader spot and you cant kick them. We need a checkbox in the LFG window that indicates if you are willing to be the leader when the trial is formed. At least this gives the PUG group a person that is willing to lead instead of some newb that doesnt even know to bring up the league ui. A vote to kick would also be nice if you find that the leader is AFK or griefing the trial. Also with this an event wont start unless it finds at least one person in the Q with the leader checkbox clicked.
4. The average time needs to be changed to show how many people are currently in the Q waiting and for what, and how many are tagged as leaders. Showing us how often a preformed max filled league does the trial is useless.
5. Team layouts in a pug league are a mess. Push everybody into team 1 until that fills then everbody goes into team 2. This may be less of a problem when we have better leaders but right now its a pain and the leader never seems to know how to move people around.
6. Add to existing event seems broken. I have only once ever been added to an existing event. This should display how many events and of each type are currently running that are not at max or are locked. It would be nice if I could select one of them and instantly be added to that event. -
When i20 was in beta I thought to myself, of my 50s which toon brings a bit of everything to a team and will help a team beat some hard content. I also wanted a toon that could take a beating so I wont have to rez every 5 seconds versus level 54 nasties.
It was a choice between my ill/rad, crab, fortunata, warshade, elec/nin, elec/elec dom or my DP/MM blaster. I love to play them all (thats why they are all 51, and all IOed with purples and sets), but the short list to match the above widdled the list down to ill/rad, crab or fort.
The fort I removed from the list, because even though he has perma mindlink and 60% def to melee and ranged with it, without a heal or +HPs one or 2 lucky hits means death.
The ill/rad is very strong with perma PA, but not very sturdy if I start taking damage.
The crab seems to have it all. Team buffs (+20% def, +16% to hit, 30% damage), debuff (-20% res AOE every 8 seconds, and achilies-20% in suppression) good personal defense (45% ranged def), mid 50% resistance to most damage, a hitpoint pool that matches most brutes with perma serum, pets for helping to take down runners, awesome status protection, and some massive AOE damage.
It seems to be a pretty good choice. I have all slots unlocked except lore (1 more BAF should do it). And it matches how I expected a crab to play on these trials, sturdy and useful to the team.
Judgement: I went with ION. I like the increased AOE effect area from the jumping, and the extra damage side. If I am gonna hit em with my AOE I want it to hurt bad, and take out as many as possible!
Interface: I have 9 pets, and 2 more when I get lore. I like the reactive damage proc to help pump up all that damage that me and my 9 close friends are pumping out. The res debuff is also nice, but probably too small to really notice, but -10% res from this + -20% from venom, + -20% from achilies proc = -50% res debuff. Not too bad!
Destiny: This is the hard one. I went with the heal (rebirth I think). I am going with the regen side, because I already have high hps, def, res, recharge, and status protection. A high regen should be a nice extra layer of protection that me, my pets and my team can use.
Lore: The most disapointing one for me because of the 33% uptime. I would much rather have a power like this that works like a perma pet (short recharge, high end cost), with reduced effect. But we got what we got. So my plan is to treat this like 5 minutes of extra DPS which means I have no interest in the support pets. So the boss+lieut damage is what I want. Probably gonna go with the warworks one since that seems to be the winner of the highest DPS boost.
So how has your VEAT done and what did you pick and why? -
Puging the trials (solo into the LFG) has been a much better experiance than preformed pugs. On a preformed it seems to take forever to get whatever the hell the leader is looking for before they will enter the trial. To make it even worse people in league chat start gettting nasty which causes people to drop, which makes it take even longer to start. To top it off the one preformed 16 man lamb that actually started, failed the same trial that I had just completed on a 8 man solo pug!
So I think I will stay away from the preformed PUGs for a bit. Its much quicker to just jump in solo and be done with it.
The all RO BAF started out great. We had 16 people and we jumped in. The strange thing was that we got hooked up with 8 pugs. It would have been much better if we could have locked the league and just did it with our SG. We had no trouble winning the BAF, but we could have probably gotten some badges if we didnt have the others join us. -
Quote:Aura I love your incarnate mode option, it gets better every time I think about it. I dont know if the devs will ever do it, but it would add a bunch more i20 threads content to the mix with what seems little effort on thier part.Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
Common suggestion re-stated: add in an Incarnate mode for all the old lvl 45+ content that you can OPTIONALLY turn on. But only if you have AT least ONE of the +1s in any of the three slots that give it. Allow the two new +1s to work only on the Incarnate Modes of these tfs.
Incarnate mode would bump every mob up to a minimum of lvl 54. Other options you could add is bumping every elite boss or boss that exists in the old content to AV level (that would make the ITF VERY interesting.
) Other options: cut the number of insp drops in half throughout the tf (not sure if they have the tech for this though). Also there are options NOW that you can set that can make stuff harder. I think no insp use or temp use are some. They could add that to Incarnate Modes also.
Incarnate mode:
level 45+ TFs only (ITF, Kahn, LGTF, STF, LRSF, COP, Cuda)
All mobs set to level 54.
All mobs drop threads instead of shards.
No temp powers.
New reward at the end is 1 astral merit instead of the alpha component (reward merits can still be selected instead). -
Quote:Yeah but ION judgement + a VEATs venom grenade -(res) did pop all the the minions in the group, and the boss was down to about 50% or so on a Lambda run. I had to make sure my omega bomb was not wasted when the other player used his ion.Originally Posted by Seldom
Just to note, Judgement is awesome. But please, don't let the power go to your head.
I had someone on a low damage TF team last night assure us that we didn't need to worry about extra groups, all people should hit the boss at all times because their judgement power would kill all else that came near the boss. It really didn't, and the squishies kept getting hammered because the extras were not dealt with. Remember, kids! Judgement: awesome AoE, NOT an "I WIN!" button.
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I agree with Jibikao. My 51 elec/nin stalker is no different than a Elec scrapper when it comes down to +3 level mobs. The hps the lambda crates have is too high for 1 AS to pop them, and now you have a full group of high tohit +3s looking to kick your butt, and a crate with still more than 50% of its hps.
This is why I picked my Crab VEAT to do the early trials while they are hard. I got -res, +def, +tohit, +dam to the team and I have good def, res and +hps. A few more threads and I will add even more -res with my massive AOEs with my shiny new interface -res IO.