Moonlighter

I forgot one other thing; ammo dancing in a group to keep up the -Res from Piercing Rounds is really annoying. Make it work with all ammo.

I agree that the non-crashing nuke is good but that's about all the set has to offer.

~ The set's two work horse AoEs are long animation DoTs which makes kiting difficult and exaggerates the effect of the alpha strike. It also gives the enemies more time to close range.

~ While the first two attacks are not bad with Incendiary, The third tier attack is particularly bad. It has both a glacial animation and a shorter range. The frustrating thing is that the animation has a long delay where you are not actually doing anything except standing there.

~ Redraw is present on all the gun sets and that's why they get crash-less nukes, but the fact that DP does a lot of its effects up close makes it particularly bad on this set. The play style of Archery and AR allow for a satisfying ranged strategy that lets you minimize redraw. The in your face style of DP, from the PBAoE nuke to the long damage over time nature of its AoEs that allows the spawn to close makes the set want to mix in melee and control attacks from the secondary as part of your chain and that exaggerates redraw.

~ The nuke is PBAoE so it roots it the middle of the spawn while you use it. While its good, this means you have to be more resilience to use it in large spawns without dying because you'll take melee damage. This largely negates the strategy of soft capping ranged defense.

The set doesn't need much, it just needs one advantage to make it fun when your nuke is down. If I was going to fix the set, I'd drastically reduce the animation on the third tier single target attack, or to Piercing Rounds. Actually, if they removed the stupid "throw my guns in the air" portion of Piercing Rounds entirely so it was fast enough to have good single target DPS with the "bonus" of being able to hit an extra enemy or two in a line I think I would really love set. Conceptually I like lining up that attack; I just skip it because of the animation.

I disagree with posters saying Darkness Control is not good; I am enjoying it and find it to be very effective. To use it effectively you need to be good at lining up cones though. It's probably one of the better sets if you don't include the broken-ness that is Seeds of Confusion.

One other thought; yeah I have the fiery wings too and love the concept of a flying fire character, but Flight is terrible for /Fire.

First, Hover costs a more endurance than Combat Jumping if you are stacking defense. You want to build towards a position where you can drop Consume.

Second, you'll want Combat Jumping's Immobilization protection. You don't want to waste a whole cycle of Burn because some Galaxy dropped a Immobilization effect on you as you are closing.

Third, you can't drop Burn while hovering so you end up losing valuable defense.

I'll set aside the fact that this particular combination is, IMO, much better on the Brute and assume you would rather play scrappers, which is cool. You post enough on the forums to know what you are probably getting into and the pros and cons of each. Just keep in mind that setting aside the ability to keep foes in Burn, the 90% cap for Fire resistance is really nice. Okay that's out of my system.

I know it sounds weird, but I don't think chasing recharge is the way to go in this build. Your main attack chain will be interrupted by repeated use of Burn, and the only other thing recharge gets you is more use of your heal which eats your DPS.

Instead I would focus on building for S/L defense, then for E/N defense. You are very resistant to Fire already, which only leaves a hole for Cold which is fortunately somewhat uncommon. I would figure out an attack chain where you can drop one of the lower level attacks entirely for slots and go for 45 S/L, 32 E/N and decent resists.


With the addition of the Scrapper set you can get an extra 5% S/L which really helps.

~ Masks with geometry, with a variety of face patterns. Both a smooth porcelain looking mask, and a metal looking one like Doctor Doom, but changed to avoid copyright issues. They should have all the face options.

(An oni mask would be cool too.)

All these masks would need to be allowed under hoods. Right now I can't use the oni mempo with a hood.

~ Sleeveless trench coats that allow all arm options. Basically for coats you have a separate sleeveless category so all large gloves and arm pieces can be used. Trench coats, however, bundle sleeveless options under one category and that category doesn't allow all the arm pieces because of clipping issues if you have sleeves. Either just allow all the options, ignoring clipping and let players decide what looks good, or have a category for sleeveless trenchcoats like jackets gets.

~ At least one energy staff with glowing ends.

~ You know the magic pack collared cape? I want a version without the large collar. Keep the mantle part that covers the shoulders. Have a small collar and a no collar version.

~ A few suits of magical/arcane/ancient armor.

~ More suits of tech armor with glowing bits. I can't get enough of those.

~ A full head motorcycle helmet.

~ More glowing patterns that overlay the character like the victorian aura, but with different patterns. Make them also have glowing eyes. In fact, add the option for glowing eyes to victorian.

Just so I understand how this works...

Is it like the Ouroboros portal, in that the vehicle is summoned to me and the group has to be near me to click on it?

Or is it like a mission transporter for all members of the group, even if the group is scattered in various zones?

PvP was bad before, but i13 made it worse.

The hardest thing to design around in PvP is to make a working engagement system in a game with pure melee and pure missile builds. The most successful PvP environments tend to simply avoid this entirely by either being focused on ranged (like FPS) or have a engagement model where melee and missile duke it out point blank. Some games have a sophisticated engagement system but it requires constant tweaking to get just right. Mess up even a little and ranged can kite melee indefinitely. If you have any percentage of kiting possible then melee has to have higher burst to compensate for the kiting down time, and when that happens if melee can stay on ranged too long then its unbalanced the other way.

The answer to all of this was supposed to be speed suppression but that didn't work and made PvP less fun. Everything was changed in i13 to slow you down so melee can actually engage missile and it's not trivial to escape and make PvP pointless. The problem with this is that one of the fun things with superhero PvP is the speed of the fights, and this went completely against that. Until CoH can solve the engagement problem and still make PvP feel fast it will have issues.

The second big problem is that crowd control makes PvP unfun, and no game has more crowd control than CoH. That was another problem they had to solve. This fixed this to make everyone vulnerable to CC.

The interesting thing is that I feel that CoH at it core actually comes closer to solving these problems than i13. Melee has a hard time closing on ranged, but ranged is vulnerable to CC. Since the basic game play roots the player each time they attack there is a built in mechanism to prevent kiting.

Making everyone slow and everyone vulnerable was the wrong direction to go IMO. I would have rather seen every melee set get a ranged root and let the management of anti-CC tools (Break Frees basically) be the decision point for ranged characters to deal with it.

At least I used to have fun grinding mobs in RV until stalkers invariably jumped me and tried to two shot me and I would try to fight them. Yes Energy Stalkers were broken and unfun, but at least I got good drops from the mobs and an occasional good fight when others tried to gank me.

Now I can't even do that because my mez protection doesn't work anymore.

I know it would be a hard pill for the devs to swallow but I'd reverse i13 and go back to fix PvP point by point without massively screwing with the game's base systems.

Wait, why are we saying Street Fighting is too good? It's almost exactly balanced with my Martial Arts. Maybe a touch better AoE at the cost of the rogue combo point system, which I consider a disad.

I have to side with Reppu here. Primary and Secondary balance has always been a goal of the scrapper forums. Getting the devs to change under-performing sets is difficult at best and has, in the past, required a certain level of forum and player momentum to get going. It will probably be much harder now since the focus of the teams will probably be on new sets for sale.

If we are discussing set balance, and a set is under-performing, then it should get fixed. If people have numerical or design information to contribute about the performance then that's cool. But coming to the thread and declaring that the set looks cool so attempts at balance should be ignore are just derailing the thread.

Two points:

~ There is a sweet spot between being exposed to a set on test and slowly losing interest in it as time goes on. I think the time to release staff exceeded that time for me. I was *really* excited for it, but now my enthusiasm has waned. That's probably something you'll want to get metrics on. Everyone probably has a different time scale before interest wanes, but my instinct tells me that the time to release staff after the players were exposed to it probably hurt excitement over the set.

~ I would suggest having a schedule where you release new market items every *two* weeks instead of the current schedule of once per week. I understand the desire to have a consistent schedule, but now that I have a handle on the speed at which you develop new items I think the weekly schedule and the frustrations of weak releases is actually hurting the excitement on release day more than the weekly schedule is helping.

New power pools are much cooler to me then new primary and secondary sets because instead of having to start an alt I now get to re-evaluate builds on my many characters. That's much more exciting to me. Well except for Staff and some kind of Gun Justice two pistol set.

Because I have to be invisible to leverage all my defense. I was looking over the revamped set thinking "This looks good, why haven't I played it?" Then in the game I found (again, since that's what turned me off the set previously) that you can't suppress the stealth FX like you can now for Dark Armor.

How are people getting enough End Recovery to skip Body Mastery? Alpha?

We are in a brave new world where issues releases and store releases get mashed together. I'm not surprised that the distinction between the two is blurred in some marketing.

From the current i22 email, in the Word on the Street section.

"I can't wait for staff fighting. It's a ton of fun on beta."

They taunt us.