Miraj

Siphon Speed is faster than Super speed! It's totally awesome at low lvls when your buddies first get super speed, and they're still lagging behind your siphon speeded toon. Did I mention that it doesn't suppress during combat? It is totally un-awesome when it misses, however and you need to stand around for 20 seconds for it to recharge.

My Kin/En has about 8-12 seconds of down-time for Hasten when she can get her ~2.3 siphon speeds rolling. I believe it takes 95% rech in Hasten and 110% global recharge to perma it. Siphon Speed is a 20% recharge buff, so if you can manage to keep 2 rolling most of the time, you only need another 70% to perma Hasten. In most cases, it won't be worth it, however, as having better, more relevant enhances is better than closing that 10 second gap of hasten down time. The Kin primary is slightly hosed in this respect, as most of the primary powers don't take sets with recharge bonuses.

I still take superspeed on my kin, and have a stealth IO for full invisibility. It really helps for positioning for kinetic effects, all of which can potentially draw aggro. I actually have Hover, SuperSpeed, and Inertial Reduction along with siphon speed, so I have a lot of travel options. My secondary is energy, and its a very attack-light build.

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what you think about my Neutrino Bolt slotting? I've never been a fan of Deci:chance for BU...but it seems doable in this power..


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Achilles Heal Proc all the way!!

So Desdemona is basically Bettie Page with straight hair? I can get behind that.

I know how profitable crafted IO's can be. I made my first few hundred mil that way (in huge, 15-40M chunks) selling them. However, I'm FAR too lazy to gather the salvage and craft IOs to sell. I know I'm leaving money on the table. That's cool with me, you guys can have it.

I'm *almost* too lazy to craft my own IO's, but I'm still too cheap to buy crafted ones. You guys can't have my monies yet!

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I let them beat on me for about 10 minutes, and it came up 5.47% for Slash, and 10.71% for Slice. Ah, the Broad Sword attacks have a little extra accuracy, which would account for Slash, or just the small sample size.


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Do Cims always lead with slash and follow with slice? That would somewhat explain your numbers, depending on what your def debuff res is like.

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Here's a tip for you Turbo, I have actually gotten booted from teams while playing defenders because the blasters felt I was doing too much damage. They didn't like the idea of a 'support' type who could defeat enemies as well as they could. And that's using a secondary most people consider gimped due to it being lethal damage.


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Wait, your defense here is that some terrible PuG leader who doesn't doesn't know how to play kicked you from their team, thus defender damage is fine? This is ludicrous. They're the same player who would kick you for spamming that fuzzy green stuff everywhere as a RAD, or begs you to stop bubbling them because they can't see their costume.

I had a shield/ss tank on an ITF I was running. Almost every group he would Shield Charge+Footstomp, destroying everything in sight, leaving barely anything for the scraps. You know what I did? As team leader, I said "THAT was SICK!!!!" then gave him more speed boost and fulcrum shift.

And, did you just knock Dispersion bubble? I'm really confused.

But to get relevant, the important thing that must be said is that your analysis is wrong. It is wrong regardless of the numbers you use because you are considering only a very narrow slice of behavior that any given AT is capable of, instead of taking a holistic approach that considers all factors. You can't make any kind of meaningful statement about AT balance based upon what they can do just once give specific conditions, you need to consider how they perform over time, ask Turbo has attempted to do. (I can't validate her approach or refute it because I'm too lazy to look up the numbers and do the math) This is in fact how all game balance needs to be performed.

Do you think the devs look at Scourge and say "well if it triggers, its x, and if it don't its y", then nod their heads and say "that oughta do it!".

No, they model it, consider its trigger percentages, factor in its value per power, consider attack chains, consider different groups, varying HP lvls, teamsize, buffs, until they have a composite understanding of how the power behaves. That's the only way to even begin balancing such a power. Then you add back all other factors, such as damage cap, enhances, candy, buffs, etc. etc.

Anyrate, Madam, this argument has become horribly derailed. Instead of being worried about Turbo's opinion of herself, you should seriously consider whether the figures you were calculating, regardless of the accuracy of your numbers, have any meaningful relevance to the question of "Is Defender damage underpowered, or fine?" because fundamentally it does not. Defender damage needs to be a consideration of how they perform over time. A single activation of a single power is not a meaningful indicator.

Yes, it really is that easy. Here's what I do:

Find a popular IO set that lots of people use, like Red Fortune, Titanium Coating, Doctored Wounds. For any of these sets, the most traffic is at the highest level so the most IO recipes of this set are being bought and sold at that range. This also means the prices for this resource will vary widely as supply and demand waver in and out of sync.

Set out a few "feeler" bids for a particular IO recipe, like Crushing Impact Acc/Dam/End. I might bid 10x 455,000, 10x 522,000, 10x 611,000. The spread depends on watching the market and knowing the range that these sell for. Set these and forget them for a few days, usually Sun, Mon, Tues, when supply is riding higher. Come Thurs, Fri, Sat, when demand picks up with people leveling, log back in take whatever I've bought, and list it all for whatever I feel the market will bear. On a Sat evening, the demand tends to be pretty high, and a lot of IO recipes will be sitting with many open bids and no products. I'll go back and list them all for 1,777,000. After marketing fees that can net you over 10m per slot, but it takes a week to clear. I'm ok with that because I don't have much time to play these days.

Lately, inflation made everything go nuts, and I came back to find I'd made 30-80M per slot, but that's pretty much a one-time thing I suspect, since my buy prices next time around will all be much, much higher.

The trick is that pretty much everything on the low end of the market varies in price by about 1000%, because sums of money like 200,000 or 2,000,000 don't matter to many players. They'll list it for 1, they'll bid 2M, they just want what they want NAO!

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Wouldn't your powers coming back faster help your offense and defense?

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For attacks, yes.

Sets like FF and Rad are less excited about a rech boost. Rad has a lot of powers that are toggle, or like AM that don't self-stack. LR and EMP are the only powers that benefit from recharge, and EMP is pretty situational. Assuming you put in the investment to get AM perma, or near-perma, additional recharge doesn't help much.

Force Field is even worse off with its cast-and-forget buffs, and some powerful toggles, the only recharge bonuses they see would be for highly situation powers.

So recharge would be a blessing for Dark, Cold, Kin, TA, decent for some sets, and almost irrelevant for the above.

On the subject of attacks, I don't think I would benefit much from faster attack cycling, since I'm already using primary buff/debuff powers in combat, attack recharge time isn't a limiting factor in my damage dealing, its that I'd rather be using my far-more effective primaries and let others do the killing.

Given the general market inflation, and the prices on the chase PVP IO's, I don't see how they can keep such a low INF cap. Those suckers go for 300-600M Inf right now, and you can only hold 2,000M? Really, I'd like to see more effort put into reeling prices back, getting chase items around or under 100M each (and I realize the complexity of such a statement, so don't think that I don't), but barring that, raising the inf cap would at least allow a body to go shopping without having to bid/convert/mule INF around on alts all the time.

I'll tear up a Chaos Confetti, but that's as high as I'll go.

I was not overly impressed with Ninjitsu at first (my standards were unbelievably high for defense sets, having played I1-4 Regen, and perma-Unstop Invuln). After getting her to high levels and capping defenses via IOs, which can be done quite cheaply I might add, she's an absolute wrecking ball of a toon to play. With 3 sets of Zephyr in the build, I dropped Acro, and haven't been knocked since. Since you can cap your defenses without taking tough/weave, its a remarkably end-light build as well. I have stamina 6 slotted for the +Def bonus at 6, but there's absolutely no way I can run low on end with this character.

I DO get occasionally bursted to death, and that's probably something SR would have an easier time surviving with their resists. This only happens with something like 4+ bosses, or an AV that I am foolishly trying to tank. Most AVs can 1 hit a stalker without any resists, so I'm particularly not suited to the task.

This has been debated back and forth to death and it goes both ways.

I have two toons slotting Gaussian's BU, a PB with it in Nova form, and a Stalker with it in BU. The stalker needs it in BU for the positional def bonuses anyways, and she'll occasionally get the 'double build up' assassin's strike that is just devastatingly powerful.

Nova form is a solo squiddy form toon that runs around farming groups of stuff for AoE funtimes. The BUs are only 5 seconds in duration and are almost never useful. I this was a toon that I cared at all about maximizing, I would respec it out, but I don't care that much about her efficacy.

If your entire attack chain has similar damage numbers - and I can't think of a set that would behave that way, but one might exist - then having BU proc in a toggle might work fairly well if you play in big groups and are constantly attacking.

If you have peaky high-dmg attacks and smaller attacks, then the BU+proc BU + super attack 1, super attack 2 will be much, much more effective the 1/3-1/5 of the times you get to use it than having randomly enhanced proc BUs.

Especially for my stalker, getting the ~1/20 double build up AS + Energy Transfer on a boss is crazy good, whereas a BU of any other 2 attacks would be much less effective. ET+TF would be close in efficacy, but EM's attack chain is such that those don't usually go together, at least not on the same target anyway.

[edit: forgot the BU proc was a measly 5%, meaning it has almost no meaningful effect on play anyways.]

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Thanks! That's what I was afraid of. It certainly is a lot less useful than I hoped, since ordinary IOs enhance travel better than Zephyr, and the set bonuses are really not good enough to justify using Zephyr instead.

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Um... what?

Ordinary lvl 50 Fly IO: 42.4%
Blessing of the Zephyr lvl 50 "travel" IO: 42.4% (except range which is sched B)

Blessing of the Zephyr "travel"/end IO: 26.5%/26.5%

The first is as good as a generic IO, the second provides 53% total aspect enhancing for one slot. 53% > 42.4%. If you don't want your BoZ's, I'll GLADLY take them off your hands. I mean, I have about a dozen extra sets, but I'll always take more.

The ~3% defense may not seem like much, but it is THE BEST defense enhance per slot you can get in the entire game. So, its quite literally the best bonus you've ever laid eyes on. If you know how to slot for defense enhances, you would know to jump for joy for values half that large.

When the chips are down, and both Cold and FF are "asked to do more" in a sense, the way I see it is that FF has some dmg mitigation with Force Bub and Repulsion/Bolt and D-field, but none of these powers help you kill faster.

Cold has significant dmg mitigation with KD, slows and -rech and -special (I think its comparable, but this can be argued every which way), but they also pack a hefty -RES, and a -DEF, meaning the threats are killed faster.

Also, there is a fairly large element of random attached to using KB powers (having played 80+ levels of energy blasting toons). Sometimes animations link in a way that make KB recovery faster. Sometimes your bearing, or the foes bearing changes last minute causing KB to be less or more effective than you expected. And then all KB powers are on some % chance with very rare mag resistance, whereas debuffs (assuming hitting, in both cases) always apply, and are subject to whatever debuff resistances the mob has. This makes the much more certain.

There are some very-very niche applications where FF Force bubble absolutely trivializes certain encounters, mainly because its effect is not really resisted in a fair way because it is such a unique power. And, sure FF is WAY effective in those encounters. But I wouldn't really weigh those heavily. I mean, group fly is REALLY GOOD in some very specific encounters, but that doesn't make it a good power.

You would have to be crazy not to want every mother-loving buff out there on your toon. Unfortunately, some crazy people do play this game.

So, let me get this straight, you *don't* want to be an invincible tank mage? Really? Do you use inspirations? Do you slot and enhance your powers? *sigh*

I don't buy the GFX card excuses either. What exactly do they do when they fight a villain type that is heavy in particles, like rad blasting foes, or fire? If your box can't play the game (and this game is like, what, 5 years old now?) you need to upgrade, NOT become more or less dead weight on the team.

And tankers in caves who don't want SB.. L2P. There. I said it!

There is a neat trick that requires amazing amounts of luck and timing, but it can make activating Dull Pain kill you if Light Form crashes at the same time. I still laugh out loud whenever I manage to pull it off.

Since both of the crash effects are "value setting effects", you can't make them take less than they would by using powers. Activating Dull Pain will essentially leave you with 14% base hit points instead of 10%, but with a higher HP/sec regen due to higher cap. There's nothing that can be done to have end, so you just have to eat some candy no matter what.

I had a friend who was THE laziest player ever, and not a very good CoH player on top of that. He complained about forgetting to rebubble people every 4 minutes when playing his FF, so I suggested he get a digital egg timer and use it to keep track while he played. For some reason, he derived some perverse joy from this tactic, and it actually made him more attentive. Just a thought.

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"You heal in human form, right?"

from a friend when I mentioned I would be setting up my all-human PB's second build for triform.

...Why, yes, of course! *Reform Essence*

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Don't forget Essence Boost! Another powerful heal.

In all seriousness, I do enjoy Glowing Touch, although my dual form PB hardly ever gets to use it. And, if I ever do have to use it, it means I'm on the wrong team! I should roll a human form build just so I could maybe devote some slots to that power. I dare not on my dual form, since the builds are so short on slots already.

Set your buff bar to display the correct types of buffs so that Light Form is in the bar (I always show all buffs, being a Defender fan, so I don't know what option it is exactly). Set "blinking buffs" option to "on" so that in the last 10 seconds of Light Form, the buff icon will flicker in and out.

In your Insp Tray, combine med Insps to make purples and store them away all the time. Make a regular habit of this. Keep at least 6 meld/large Purples at all times, along with a couple blue and greens. 2 Med Purples (Good Luck) will soft cap your defense, and obviously a med/large or large/large will as well.

When Light Form starts blinking in your buff bar, eat two purples, then stack a Green and Blue in one of your Insp columns, and ideally nothing above them that you don't mind eating (another green and blue aren't bad). Hit Conserve Power if its up and you have it.

As soon as you can react to the crash (and your bars are draining), spam-click that Insps column, or spam the appropriate F-key to down the entire column of Insps. Hit a self-heal, then re-enable whatever toggles keep you alive (a shield or dwarf form), and wait out the -recovery crash before you start doing anything end heavy.

This is how I survive any hard crash power, but I'm not a fan of any of them now that none of them perma. But if you want a light form toon (I'm assuming for theme purposes, since triform is probably much better), I don't know any way to survive it besides copious candy.

I got about 5 drops in I12 when I came back, got about 1 every 2 hours of Cim wall grinding. Then, after I13 or so (and most likely no change to the purple drop code), I went about 20 hours of Cim wall grinding without a single drop. .

This cemented in my mind that grinding purple drops (for me) is pointless, and that even at 100+M, it is far far better to just buy them on the market.

Oh, and TWO of those purple drops were Fortunata's Hypnosis: Chance for Placate. Yeah, you OWE ME, Cimerora!

Yet another thing Cold does very, very well! Filling the screen with spammy blue crap!

I still love my cold defender!

Woah, lockdown is 8 seconds? Gravitational Anchor is 5, right?

**runs off to get lockdown procs**

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I prefer a power set that does 1 thing very very well.

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Really? Because Cold has unparalleled -Rech, -Spd AND -Res, while providing the largest +Recovery bonus in the game. It doesn't just do them "very, very well", they're THE BEST. Seems like it would be right up your alley. By contrast Rad/ doesn't do anything really well. It's a toolkit set with a little bit of everything thrown in. It's a potent combination, but it doesn't do any single thing very well.

I recently took a soft-capped Nin stalker to an AV-filled MA mish just to test the waters. I could stand toe to toe against several of them for several minutes, but it was too easy for them to get in a lethal hit that just floored me instantly. Most AV's hit for more than my HP total (just over 1200), so whenever those hit and I don't have absolutely full HP, I'm insta-dead.

Mako just seemed to kill me dead really easily, not sure why, but he did it twice.

Numina got in a lucky lift + psi tornado that killed me after a few minutes of fighting.

Ice Mistral - I shouldn't have even tried it with all of her terrible -rech debuffs, but we just both stood there for a really, really long time.

Positron not only debuffs defense, but his Cosmic Burst was about 1340 dmg, well in excess of my total HPs.

In 'normal' encounters, I can jump into almost anything without trouble.

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Since changing you colors will be -20% damage how many of the non-carebears will actually do this?

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That 20% is a maximum value. Remember, it scales depending on how far you deviate from the correct color.

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Regen will have an ULTRA green FX setting, which is like the annoyance factor of I1 regen x3, which offers a 15% regen bonus to all powers. This scales down all the way to RED, where all powers will actually reduce your character's regen.

Choking cloud is 6s for defenders, 7.x for controllers.
It rolls every 5 seconds, I believe
Lockdown is a 5 second hold in PVE
It should check every 10 seconds like any proc in a toggle.
Haven't tried this yet myself.
Hold enhances should not increase this hold duration as far as I know, but if there's some bug that has enhance affect proc values...