Miraj

Some lowbie at Wents once asked me for a halloween mask salvage bit. They were clearly the type of player that routinely bankrupted themselves to get swank costume pieces. Since they weren't asking for just plain inf, I picked one up at "BUY IT NAO" prices and handed it to them. I think it was like 650k, which is barely noticeable for anybody with a stable full of 50's.

It is not too difficult to determine which is better, or at least get the actual numbers down on paper:

Health bonuses reduce the amount of time to fill your HP bar:

Time in seconds to full HP = 240 / (100 + sum of all health bonuses)

Calculate T for your current toon, then again with the +health set bonuses above. Divide your current toon's HP by each T value, and that gives you HP/sec with and without the health bonuses.

Now, calculate HP/sec using your current HP total, and the HP total with bonuses. Keep in mind that the % bonus is applied to your base, so first find the base for your AT/lvl, then apply the bonus. Calculate HP/sec with and without the +HP bonuses.

Keep in mind that the +HP bonuses will also provide a one-time HP cushion as well as the added HP/sec, which factors into your total available HPs in a given fight. This may not be a significant factor if your fights tend to last longer than a few seconds.

Vigilance always should have been a 2ndary effects/buff/debuff boost of some sort instead of an endurance discount.

As already pointed out - It does not help sets like FF, or DM in which parties do not take as much damage if the defender is doing their job - and when the green bars get low, the discount still doesn't help because those sets do not heal (yes, DM has a heal, but its not the focus of the set).

It does not help sets that have powerful end-fixing built in, such as Kinetics and Cold Dom, or sets that are preemptive such as FF.

Defiance was deemed underperforming because it relied on Blasters to "play badly", and it was hard to manage on teams with varied buffs and ATs. They fixed that. Now its Vigilance's turn. It's MORE broken than Defiance was.

Vigilance rewards a defender whose party is getting smashed in and losing life. This is incorrect. It should instead reward Defenders doing their job: Buff/debuff/damage, and teaming (a la cosmic balance). This could somehow triggers a super power that increases buff/debuff powers temporarily.

Did "cone warp" allow you to break the target cap for cones? You can routinely hit 8 targets with powers like Ripper if you stack foes properly... I'd love to have the old skool broken AE cones that hit EVERYONE, but I'm ok with the current dmg output it offers.

If you're fighting 51, 52, or 53 foes (by having large party size and high difficulty missions), you will get above lvl 50 SO drops.

51, or 52 can be ++'d out to get lvl 53 efficacy. which is something like 39.3% enhance for schedule A.

When I came back to CoH, most of my high level toons had Pre-ED builds, full of lvl 53 SOs and HamiOs. I noticed that after ED, 3x lvl 53 SOs in a power puts you at 1.1% less than 3x lvl 50 generic IOs, so, since I'm both pathologically stingy and lazy, some of my characters are still rocking 53 SOs instead of IOs for powers that tend to take only one kind of enhancement (i.e. Hasten).

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I didn't know empathy was a healer set.... wait, there are healers in this game?

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C'mon, you already know that Emp is the closest thing to a healer set in CoX, and there are people who roll pure healers. Some people just enjoy playing "green bar whack-a-mole". I can relate to that. I played a Kin for years, which is a lot like playing "Blue bar + Buff bar Whack-a-mole".

Instead of slotting Freebird, you should probably slot either Soaring: Fly and Soaring: Fly/End, or Zephyr: Travel, and Zephyr: Travel/End for more bang. Otherwise, just stick to Generic IOs.

I don't even bother taking Fly on my characters anymore, except one defender for theme purposes. Everyone else (that flies) is Hover, Raptor Pack, and Superspeed.

I believe Fulmens is trying to delete inf using only the market mechanics that currently exist. Otherwise, he could do something like register an SG, convert 10B to prestige, then leave the SG. Boom, 2 minutes tops.

I just stick to about 20 particular recipes. Bid on a stack of 10 for about 25-50% of going price, then get the stacks and sell them for 250-500% of whatever I paid. Rinse repeat. If a stack cycles quickly this way, next week I might do two stacks. Each stack will clear around 8-25M per cycle, and takes maybe a week to cycle. Unfortunately, I'm not really playing much CoH at the moment, but I log in maybe an hour or two a week to set up my bids and watch the money pile in.

Here's my 2 minute analysis:

Inv is moderate defense and good resistances with best in class S/L resistance. They also get Dull Pain. Inv is thematically a 'stand there and take it' type character, who shrugs off hits and dodges many of them. They have a solid defense most of the time, but have a rough time with Psi and Toxic damage, having no defenses to those damage types.

WP is too new of a set for me to really understand, but they have modest defense and resistances, and really high regeneration (reaching regen levels), and a weird damage debuff power. Compared to Inv, you take more dmg per hit, don't dodge as many, but heal it back very quickly. They don't have the same damage type holes.

Cold definitely has a bevvy of AV slaying capabilities, and their debuffing powers seem on-par with some of Rad's powers. You can definitely solo a number of AVs efficiently with a Cold/* def. However, (and I think it was Silverado who pointed this out to me), it would be really difficult for Cold to sustain the same levels of DPS as Rad, since its debuffs are much more fire/forget, and ice needs to re-apply debuffs every few seconds.

I think Cold may be able to eke some parity by having nearly capped -rech on the AV, which reduces incoming dmg by quite a bit, but that is inherently more fragile than Rad's style of AV slaying.

Resurrect is a specifically bad choice for slotting, but I would extend it to any single target rez.

Twilight is an entity all unto itself. Some people really like it as a short duration disorient and slot it like a control power. I still think that's kind of a waste of slots, but its less deplorable than slotting Rez.

Elixir of life? Well, if it takes Resist, you could always put a Steadfast -KB or Res/+Def.

It'll work with just the slotted enhances, but I wouldn't recommend this. You need 4 enhances for the -kb bonus. If you're muling 4 enhances and expending 3 slots for some kb points, that's just not worth it. I would highly recommend just spending the 25-35M for a Zephyr -kb and stick it in a travel power.

I created a vid of the EMP animation on a lvl 50 /rad troller. The quality is kinda iffy because the combination of Mac client + screen capture utility causes all the objects to blink in and out. Weird. Anyrate, here it is, although it might take youtube another 10 minutes or so to fully render it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJuPjkrCa84

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Math is good for you

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Have you READ Arcanaville's Guide To Defense? You may change your tune, young master Evan. You may change your tune indeed.

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Arcanaville's Math hurts my brains. [Hmm, this may be the root of my problem.]
My weak Applied Mathematics degree withers and dies in the iridescent power of Arcanaville's computational and theoretical legerdemain.

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how is Arcanaville's defense math anything but applied?

I've just been flipping Impervium recipes, buy a stack, then sell em at a markup. I've made about 340M over the past month slowly doing that. I had no idea the crafted IOs went for so much (I don't even pay attention to those anymore - too much trouble since you can only buy/sell one per slot).

It's a race between my lvl 50 Scrapper and lvl 50 Defender to see who can join the Ebil Billionaire club first. Both are over the 500M mark now, although the scrapper's been doing the Impervium flipping, so he's pulled ahead at almost 700M now. To 'balance' the field, he's also buying all my LotG:R's blueside.

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I'm sorry, but you are in fact wrong.

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Again, I'm more than happy for people to disagree with me. It's statements like this that make me not feel like discussing it. Thanks for reminding me why to avoid the forums.

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Both gave reasonable reasons why they thought you were wrong. No harsh language was used. Whats the problem? Should they be more indirect when stating their opinion?

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No he's just being ironic in being absolute in his inability to accept absolutes. And, he wants a cookie because he can time his heals to overlap with incoming damage animations. You certainly deserve a cookie, because cutting down your reaction time on heals saves lives.

None of this, however, is relevant to the fact (not opinion) that healing is reactive and cannot be preemptive.

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If you have 3 extra slots to spare having the rez 4 slotted with 2 50 common IO's each of recharge and cost reducer is the ideal, but by no means necessary.

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Do not under any circumstances slot your rez. It does not take set bonuses. There is no reason to slot it. Do not listen to anyone who tells you your rez needs slotting.

If you're low on end, eat a blue then rez your mates. If your rez is recharging, hand them a baby blue, then hit them with HO+CM+Fort, all of which will be optimally slotted because you didn't waste any on rez.

Assuming a single Rech IO, and about 45% global recharge bonuses elsewhere, Rez should be up in 100 seconds, as opposed to 82 if you put a second slot and recharge in it. Is shaving 18 seconds off of what should be a very situational power worth a slot? I don't think so.

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I also went via Ghost Widow's parton pool and picked up Shadow Meld. A MoG wannabe which give ya Elude like defense for 15 seconds. Good for running or to start a AV fight with or to retoggle after a tier 9 crash.

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I was really excited about Shadow Meld until I saw how easy it was for a */Nin stalker to cap all positions. With Hide, CJ, and the two def toggles I'll be a little over in all 3 positions, so Meld would only help against +tohit or -def situations. Went with shark mastery instead for Hibernate, figuring it is a better panic button.

Do PVP stalkers slot interrupt red in their AS? This makes a mammoth difference for pulling off other interruptible attacks in the game. A couple of those in AS could make it look like a stalker was running and ganking you.

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Actually I'm going to disagree with most here and say there is such a thing, involving the empath heals (or therm or any other with a targeted heal). I quite often used to do this on my emp. If I saw a teammate jump into a situation where I was positive they would be taking a lot of damage, I would activate a heal before they actually took the damage. That way, they would be healed immediately after taking the damage.

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This doesn't work reliably due to network and game latency, and isn't actually preemptive. So, you may disagree, but you're wrong. Healing is 100% reactive. Healing before damage is dealt does not mitigate anything.

What I would recommend to "convince" yourself that its worth it is to do a little frankenslotting. Slot a bunch of relatively inexpensive triple aspect IO's into your main attack powers. If you put in a bunch of Acc/Dam/End, Acc/Dam/Rech, and Dam/End/Rech, you'll end up with ED capped damage, and lots more Acc/End/Rech than you could ever get without inventions.

After grooving to that for a while, I would probably recommend designing towards enough recharge so that you can use only your biggest guns all the time (PowerBurst, PowerBlast, BoneSmash, TotalFocus), and as much Ranged Defense as you can possible muster. Knock 'em down, then melee while they're getting up, then run back to ranged and have them miss you a bunch. If you make use of many long recharge clicks, like powerboost, conserve power, etc. then you might go even heavier +recharge. But, if you can get your ranged def to around 40%, that's like having 4x the hitpoints on a blaster.

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I got a lvl 50 Miracle:Heal recipe as a drop.

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You mean a 40 Miracle: Heal? I'm of the understanding that it only goes to 40.

There is an obvious synergy between increased defense and the hide+as mechanics. With a Ninjitsu, or SR Stalker with high def outside of hide, you can placate+AS in the middle of a crowd without getting interrupted pretty consistently. This isn't really an option for non-def characters. Non-defs however, should be able to stand toe-to-toe more reliably without getting occasionally floored by unpredictable spike damage.

With IO soft capping, however, it seems to me that the performance of capped def sets starts to pull away from res-based stalkers for a lot of situations, but the devs have stated explicitly that they don't balance based on IO bonuses.

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Won't it proc on yourself when you cast Burn though?

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I think this is: No, because the pet does not grant the immob protection, and its burn power, which triggers the proc, doesn't target you anyway, so double no.

It seems for maximum proc'age, you'd want to put it in Blazing Aura, unless you have a PBAoE whose entire cast cycle is less than 10 seconds. I don't know how good of an idea that really is. I have some damage proc in Quills (full set of obliteration I think) for a set bonus, but I haven't really noticed it doing that much overall. I suppose its better than nothing.