Moonlit_Whisper

I really believe in the "less is more" school of thought and I think it applies here as well.

The only change I would like to see is toggle supression. That's it.

Anything else I would prefer to be on a wait and see basis. Kheldians got such a huge boost overall already that it would very easy to totally throw everything out of whack if you started messing with too many things at once. Start small, and this is something that practically everyone has asked for, and then see where we are after.

I wont comment much on the powers and slots as I am still trying to come up with a tri form build I like that has Defense as well for when i23 goes live. However, I think I have my incarnate abilities pretty well chosen.

For the Alpha I am currently using Cardiac for my Human only PB but once I try to go tri form I will likely switch to Agility or Spiritual for the recharge. Not sure which one will be better as the End mod and the healing mods are both attractive.

Interface I chose reactive so I could get a -res on basically all my attacks. I've been very happy with it so far even if the color of the effect does clash a little with the overall blue white energy theme.

Destiny was a bit of a hard choice but in the end I picked up Ageless. The reason I chose ageless was mainly due to debuffs, and specifically recharge debuffs. In any build where Lightform is going to be perma your biggest enemy will be -recharge debuffs. Not only does ageless have a huge recharge buff which can help negate debuffs, it also has debuff resistance if you choose the right part of the tree. Win win. I thought about barrier but honestly your already capped on resists except for Psionic which isn't a huge deal and you are already building for some defense. You dont really need more of either, so fill your destiny with an ability you really cannot get anywhere else. In this case Debuff resistance and more recharge added in as a bonus.

As for Judgement I ended up going with Pyronic recolored to match the Blue-white of all the other PB attacks. I am very happy with how it turned out actually and it basically just looks like a continuation of the PB powers.

Lastly I think I will comment really on one PB power and that is Dawn Strike. It's a very powerful attack but I found that since I got my Judgement slot I never used it period. Judgement recharged faster and doesn't have a crash. Even before I got judgement I rarely used it given the crash. I'd rather have Photon Seekers or Pulsar to be perfectly honest. I use both of those powers all the time as opposed to something that would just sit in my tray hardly ever being used.

My 2 inf.

I had to really think about this for some time before I let myself post a reply. For me personally I was fairly happy with my PB before the big changes that happened (most notably with build up/Inner Light and Lightform) and after the changes I was also quite happy barring one thing - given the new playstyle of chase the button as it recharges it made shifting forms take away from the high speed of button clicks and power activations.

As a result I switched from a Tri-form to a Human only and started enjoying it much more. if the new instant shift change does make it live I may end up going back to Tri form though as I really did like that aspect.

As for my 3 suggestions....

1. Toggle suppression. Yes you can do without the shields in human form with perma Light form which I do have but sometimes you find yourself with a recharge debuff or if you are tight on slots it's harder to fully slot Light form to maximize both resists and recharge without the little extra from the shields. My human only has all 3 and uses them and I wouldn't change that for anything. If I was a triform though having to retoggle all of those plus assault and hover... well that is close to 10 seconds I am spending doing nothing else after shifting down to human form. QoL change but a very big one.

2. The knockback vs knockdown debate. Until recently I was just fine with the KB as it was. I learned how to position myself and knew what attacks were most likely to cause it and so on. However, after having gotten my kheld several level shifts I am suddenly knocking EVERYTHING back with every attack. My knockdown is now knockback and there's nothing I can do about it except raise my level difficulty in mission settings. I don't like that. Not that I can't handle the higher level difficulty but rather I don't always want to do that depending on what activity I am involved in. Sometimes having the higher level shift is good, but as it stands with practically everything a PB does having either KB or KD and having all of them forced to change to KB makes life a bit harder. Personally I would prefer that both the KD and KB be removed from the majority of our attacks and kept JUST AS THEY ARE on a select few that make sense to do so, specifically Solar Flare and Dwarf Flare. I don't think we need control in our powers really. Once we hit Lightform we are darn near invincible and if you have access to all 3 healing/HP Buff powers even a non perma LF build should be near unkillable outside of certain situations. Just take the KB/KD away and preserve it for certain powers.

Again I probably wouldn't feel this way except for my recent experiences with the Incarnate level shifts. YMMV.

3. I had a hard time coming up with #3 but I really like AIB's suggestion of debuff resists exclusively for dwarf. Very good idea and one that would likely become a game changer depending on the resist value.

Anyway that's my 2 inf.

Yikes! Ok where to begin.

On paper your widow has everything it needs to do it's job. It will also play just fine but you are missing out on your full potential here. Slots could use some cleanup and your set choices could probably be a tad better. Lets see what I can do for ya.

Ok below I came up with a cheaper build, gets you soft caped to incarnate content, and gives you better utility in general. It will also be 100x better on your endurance consumption as the build you had posted was eating the blue bar up at a record pace (this I personally think is the widow's biggest weakness).

I did drop Soul Tentacles as I didn't see a real reason to keep it other than as a set mule. The immob isn't something you would be looking for on a melee widow anyway. Instead I fit in Psychic scream which is a great opening cone AoE for large groups and does psychic damage which is never a bad thing. Alternatively, you could drop scream and grant invis to fit in kick/boxing and Tough for a little bit of extra survivability. I dont think I would personally but it IS an option.

Lastly, I chose Cardiac as an alpha specifically for the Hybrid changes that are coming on the horizon. If what is being said is true, that the Hybrid will be affected by the Alpha bonuses then this I think is my pick of choice given that it will reduce the .5/sec end use and will enhance the stacking damage resistance given by one of the hybrid choices. Widows just got a whole lot tougher.

Good luck! Also you might check out my guide at the bottom of my sig. It was written pre incarnate content but much of the info is still relevant when it comes down to power and set choices.

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...ACF52FC260DED0

It's a bit of a different build than I am used to, I prefer get into the thick of things and mowing stuff down but you have plenty of AoE in there plus your single target killer so that should be good.

You do have plenty of defense, you have pretty much all of the important stuff covered. Really the only things I can think of to improve it might be an alpha to help with your endurance consumption, and somewhere to put in the SoA ATO set. The bonuses are great, and the proc adds really great control when slotted into an AoE power. I have mine slotted in spin but you might get more mileage out of it in Dart Burst if I am imagining your playstyle correctly.

Good luck!

Well I wanted to give myself a couple days of playing my Tri-form PB before I said anything regarding the changes and now that I have, I have a few observations to make.

Overall I am very happy. Granted I was in the camp that was fairly happy with PB's anyway before the change now it's only gotten better. As has been stated Inner Fire was indeed a Game changer as is Lightform.

Aside from Psionic heavy groups I can pretty much steamroll through just about anything, though I will say that a +4/+8 CoT mission is a PITA with all the Death Mages healing each other and everything else constantly.

However, I do see some problems and it mostly has to do with forms and the way these changes alter the PB gameplay flow. before it was a fairly steady marathon that was pretty safe, just not terribly fast. Now, it's a great big click fest akin to how the Warhsade plays just without the need for bodies on the floor. What this has meant for me specifically is that I am finding I spend more time in Human Form than I did previously.

To clarify before the changes my strategy for big groups usually went something like this - Summon Seekers, hit Build Up, shift to Nova and pull with an AE or two. When the mob starts running towards me the seekers blast most of them back giving me time to fire off a few more AE's. Then I switch to dwarf and proceed to stomp, switching down to human now and again to fire off more seekers, hit build up, or whatnot as things were flopping on their backs. It worked really well.

Now, I can still use nova for the pull but really no point in staying there once they get to me as the Ae's aren't going to be very efficient when you are surrounded. So I go to Human form and then it's such a fast pace that..... the animation time to change forms isn't really worth it anymore. I can still see using Dwarf form given the way I like to play. There are several things about dwarf that I would really like to keep such as an extra heal, the flare which is really awesome mitigation and decent damage, as well as the taunt. Nova, I just have a hard time seeing myself use it outside of that first contact.

This kind of makes me sad as I really enjoy the triform playstyle but the more I think about it the more making a Human Only form build makes sense. For that to be really viable though it seems to me that I would need either a Perma Lightform build, a softcapped S/L or maybe melee softcapped defense build or both. Not a cheap build by any stretch of the imagination unfortunatly.

Granted my Triform build probably has most of the IO's I'd be looking for in a perma Lightform build already but for a Softcapped build I'd have to do some serious reworking of slots. A Part of me really wants to keep my Triform build though and maybe work on a second Human only version as a secondary build.

So here I am, not really sure where to take my PB. I really think the changes were posotive ones but I am not sure I am happy with the effect those changes have had on the overall game play of the PB.

Well my first question is what resolution is your normal desktop running at? You have an Nvidia 550 which is a very powerful card and very capable of running very high resolution monitors but your CoH Helper report doesn't show what this is.

A Simple way to find your current resolution -Minimize all your windows until you are looking at a clean desktop and the right click anywhere. This will bring up a menu where ever your clicked. Look down this menu until you see "Screen Resolution" near the bottom of the list. Left click this and another window will pop up listing your Monitor Brand and Model, your screen resolution, and orientation.

I suspect that your resolution is 2400ishx1600ish or higher which is making the CoH screen appear very small as it is running in 800x600.

If this is the case the solution is going to be changing the CoH resolution, but unfortunately the only method I am aware of to do that is from inside the game. I'll do a bit of digging around and see if I can come up with anything. I know there used to be a 3rd party program that allowed you to change some of the in game settings but I don't think it is supported anymore.

Meanwhile, if anyone else knows how to actively alter the game settings (Screen Res, Windowed/Full Screen Mode, etc) from outside the game UI please post it here.

I'll chime in here a bit.

First- CT Offensive is not worth the power pick. TT:Leadership combined with Follow up and the accuracy in your IO's will more than cover any accuracy issues you have. You can drop CT:O and pick up something else and I highly recommend doing so. It's a wonderful low level power essentially allowing you to slot for endurance reduction and damage exclusively in the low levels but once you get TT: leadership it's time to put it out to pasture.

Second, on the Evis discussion. I used evis for a long time. It does hit hard and when you can line it up right it hurts a good 5 or 6 mobs but at the end of the day you'll attack twice with 2 other powers in the time it takes you to complete a single evis attack. Once I dropped it from my attack chain my damage started to increase a great deal above what it was already. That's saying something! Now if you are taking it to have a second AoE power I'd prefer Psychic Scream. It's another long animation time yes but you have a really REALLY wide arc and good range on it. You'll be getting a lot of targets with it and it's psychic damage which is good for an almost totally lethal dmg AT. Still, when you get enough recharge spin is up almost constantly and well... Spin is just all sorts of awesome. It is enough all by itself to melt spawns.

Third, I think you took too many toggles. Your end usage even with Cardiac is going to be pretty rough. That is the Night Widows one real Achilles heel. I also get why you took those toggles and yes your defense numbers are impressive as a result. Still I truly believe you'd be better off chasing down the ranged defense numbers from set bonuses and mix in a few melee def set bonuses to get to the soft cap. My Widow sits about 65ish% ranged/melee/aoe defense stealthed and 57ish% in combat which is more than enough and I got there entirely with set bonuses.

Now there is one toggle that I DO recommend getting as it addresses a problem that NW's have which is survivability when something does get through your considerable defenses and that is Tough. 4 slots is plenty for tough and will add a great deal of survivability for when you do get hit. We're sort of glass cannons that can dodge and weave really well. Land a punch and we feel it however.

Fourth, I really think that your slots could be put to better use. Right now it looks like you are chasing every recharge bonus you can possibly get. That's fine and all but once you hit perma Mind Link it doesn't do a Widow as much good as other AT's. You'll be able to hit and run with an extremely devastating attack chain with a good bit less recharge than you have and you'll be able to slot more powers for things that they are lacking in. 6 slot attacks are so very worth it and again you'll be getting those all important defense bonuses from the sets allowing you to drop toggles and pick up other powers such as....


AID SELF!!! Again your defense is incredible as a Night Widow. But when you get hit you NEED something to keep yourself up. You ARE going to get hit and if you are facing something like Longbow or PPD Kheldians or even malta... anything that debuffs defense you are going to be hurting real quick. You need a heal even more than you need tough and green inspie's wont be enough. I cannot recommend aid self enough for your build. And hey, look at it this way - Even though I'd recommend slotting it with 2 interrupt io's you could go 5 slot Doctored wounds for a 5% recharge if you wanted to replace one you are losing somewhere else.

Lastly, it's been a long while since I wrote it but much of what is there is still true so I'd suggest taking a peruse through the guide in my Sig. I know you said money is no obstacle so you can take what I wrote there and go even further with it on slotting if you choose to.

Best of luck, and I sincerely hope that the above helps you get the most out of your experiences with your widow.

I have to admit I didn't read everything in this thread but one thought occurred to me early.

When did this become a competition?

Seriously? Why are we so focused on the "my numbers are better than his" rather than "I'm having fun doing the best that I personally can do?"

Maybe we're taking this far too seriously. This is one of those never ending arguments. No matter what you think is wrong, even if it's fixed as you want it to be there will always be something else that someone thinks is totally broken. It's not worth the frustration to get yourself so emotionally attached to it.

Well when I think of ghosts i personally think of something that is damn near impossible to hurt. In the real world lore of such things ghosts tend to be intangible for the most part.

Now carrying that over into CoH may be a bit challenging but I think there are two ways you can go about it. First, you can try to get your defense to the softcap. It's a popular tactic and usually works well but the new incarnate content is having a field day with defense toons right now. Besides I think option two is better given your choices of powers.

Try to cap your resistances. This is very doable with /Sonic and you can even get fairly close to the soft cap for Ranged defense as well.

This combination of decent defense with capped resistances (all self buffed) would make for a very hard to kill toon. After that it's all gravy. I've not played much with the sonic primary but I've seen it do some amazing damage particularly once scourge kicks in.

Thing to note - getting yourself near soft capped for range defense and capped resists will necessitate taking the fighting pool and possibly leadership.

I actually find the proc more useful than I first imagined it would be.

My original intention was to get ranged defense out of it with the 6 slot bonus, and I consider the proc a bonus when it does go off. Yes, you cannot count on it happening when you specifically want it to, however, it does proc often enough that I am very satisfied with it.

Again though when I do slot it, it's usually with the goal of achieving the Ranged Defense bonus at 6 slots.

Good read and I agree with most of what you said. I would like to interject a few things based on my own observations though.

First, and this is especially true with the new incarnate stuff, I feel the shields have situational uses and are not bad choices. At least Shining Shield I feel is worth taking even if you only leave it as one slot. What you put into that slot is further up for personal preference but if one is taking the Cardiac Radial Alpha slot then this shield powers up nicely with just a single slot.

However, that's not the only reason why I believe taking it is a good thing. All of the shields can be toggled on with Lightform which I also believe is worth taking even with minimal slots (read 1 or 2).

You see when I started hitting my late 30's and early 40's I was looking very hard at powers I could take that would provide at least some usage for me without the need for any additional slots. I really needed those slots for powers I had taken when I was in my 20's and lower. Several powers fit that bill but the shields and lightform both seemed to synergise well in this regard. I also started to find a niche use for Lightform but suffice to say that Lightform combined with any of the shields will bring your resistances to their respective caps, or at least close to them, unenhanced and solo.

I don't know about you but I find a huge survivability difference between when I am solo and at 65% resistances in Dwarf and when I am at the cap of 85% on a team. Lightform is a tool you can use to get yourself to that cap solo for hard targets. This works best against a single target but if you have a few AoE attacks in Human form you can probably handle a decent crowd before Lightform expires. Your single target dps is actually greater cycling through Radiant, Incandescant, Solar Flare, and whatever blast you took as your level 1 power pick than you can get by shifting forms anyway. This is mostly due to Radiant and Incandescant being really strong powers but there it is.

Another neat trick you can use to really decimate an entire spawn sitting around one big nasty target like an EB or somesuch is to eat a purple insp or two, summon your photon seekers, hit build up, shift into bright nova and lead out with proton scatter and detonation. Then fly into the half dead spawn and land to cast Dawn Strike. Eat a quick Blue and then shift into Lightform to go stomping on the EB who by this time should be about half dead. From this point you have 3 minutes to stomp said EB into the ground before you have to worry about a crash.

However, in the event you can't finish off whatever it is you are fighting before Lightform crashes you are still ok. If you can get some distance between yourself and the bad guys for a few moments before the crash this is where conserve power really shines with a single blue inspiration. Lightform crashes, you eat the blue and hit conserve power. Use reform essence and or Essence boost then you are good to go. I usually shift back into Dwarf at this point and go from there as the situation warrants but whatever works for you. That said if you have a few purples in your tray you can stay right there in the thick of things for the crash and not retreat. Just eat them before the crash actually happens and more often then not you'll be fine.

Anywho just my 2 cents on a few powers and how well they can work together to accomplish some things (especially when you can use your alpha to provide all your enhancing needs for some powers.)

I pretty much have to echo Psylenz. Sure, /elec might be a little underwhelming compared to some other dom secondaries out there but it's by no means gimped. You can do really well with it even if it's not the "best" out there. I chose it for concept reasons and have not had any complaints with it period.

Basically, once you get to 22 and can start slotting SO's (or better yet Frankenslotting IO's) you become nearly unstoppable. Your most vulnerable time is when you first engage a group of enemies (if you are solo) as they will still have endurance to attack you with unless you can get them all locked down right away. Once you get them locked down you can pretty much eradicate any and all endurance from everything in about 10 seconds. After that, you wont be taking any damage period.

You'll figure out what you can and can't do in first approaching groups and how to deal with it fairly quickly so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I seriously think that when I get him to 50 and fully IO'd out he will likely be my most powerful toon. I already have a very nice 50 Mind/Psy Dom but I can see that this Elec/Elec has the potential to leave the Mind/Psy in the dust.

I am currently leveling up a Storm/Elec/Elec Defender ( at 42 right now).

I have to admit that I don't focus on him as much as I could what with all the new alpha stuff coming along but I can give a little insight based on my experiences thus far.

First, my goal for the build was to get myself to the ranged softcap defense wise and as much resistances as I could without breaking the build. Mid's shows me having 44.8% ranged defense and 40% Smashing/Lethal/Energy resists by 50 but those numbers will skew slightly with varying IO levels.

It definitely matures late. At 42 I am sitting at 38% Ranged defense and that makes a huge difference to what I was able to do even in my mid 30's when my ranged defense was only around 15ish%. Once I get softcapped it should be even more capable. However, until you can break the 35ish% ranged defense mark things are pretty rough solo.

*Note* I should clarify that a little. Early early on soloing was pretty easy even before Inherant fitness. It wasn't until the late teens early 20's that things started catching up with me and handing my rear to me regularly. It didn't get much better until I got to 37ish when I started getting some of my 6 slot defense bonuses.

During that time your gonna have to either team for exp or slog through a challenging solo experience. I recommend teaming even after you get matured but whatever floats your boat.

Secondly, it's a MASSIVE end hog to run around with the build I came up with. You'll end up with a small handful of toggles and your storm summoning powers will each eat up a good chunk of endurance even when properly slotted. For this reason I plan to go Cardiac Radial when I finally reach 50 as my Alpha of choice.

Anywho, not intended as a guide or to replace what the OP did but just a few of my own experiences to hopefully help someone decide if this is the right path for them.

Cheers.

I didn't really pay attention before but I am noticing a small pattern here.

More often than not I am seeing that the people who are complaining about their PB's mention theirs as being a Human Only form PB.

Maybe it's significant, maybe it's not. But there seem to be far fewer people who play a Triform build speaking up about the downsides of the PB.

I've already made my opinion on the subject known so I wont repeat that here but I thought it was an interesting enough observation to mention.

I'll echo some of what Eislor said but with a few differences.

First, I really like having 6 slots in my attacks. Sure you can get away with having 5 but it's nice having 6 for the extra IO goodies you can play with. However, you may end up taking a slot or two anyway as I would really suggest at least 5 sots in Aid self. You will want it to crank out as much as possible every time you use it, and in addition you can get another 5% recharge by using Doctored wounds there (Assuming you have not reached the 5x cap on the %5 as I have not looked in detail at each of the sets used).

I heartily agree that if you take TT:Leadership you are getting absolutely no benefit from TT:Offensive. It's way overkill and not even the Incarnate TF's will require you to have that much acc/+ToHit to function.

Lastly I strongly strongly recommend that you find a way to incorporate Tough into the build with 5 slots. A little while back defense calculations in relation to Lt's and Bosses etc was changed in that ranked mobs automatically have a greater chance to land attacks regardless of what your defense is. You're no longer soft capped to everything even with 65%+ defense to all. Even at 100% and more with Elude going bosses and Lt's will have a greater than 5% chance to hit you. What this means is that you really need another layer of defense outside of just not getting hit. Tough when properly slotted can go a LONG way to addressing that.

Personally I'd drop TT:Offensive as said previously and also Gloom. Gloom is a NICE power but most of your time is gonna be spent in melee where you have other harder hitting attacks, and Poison Dart functions rather well as a ranged attack should you need one. This opens up 2 spots for either boxing or Kick followed by Tough and you have all the needed slots right there ready to go.

-to hit is interesting but again... most of what people are complaining about is a lack of raw damage from the PB in comparison to the WS. How does -to hit address that?

It doesn't, so why use it as a fix?

Take a look at the -Def in each attack now. It's actually quite minimal and has already been pointed out that the durations are very short. If you model the -Resistance in the same way you wont see anything that will disrupt game balance.

My point being is that the suggestion was made to address specifically the problems brought up by the vocal community that has posted on this forum. I'm not saying implement this and everything will be all rosey but If your going to keep toting one issue as the heart of the problems for PB's I think the proposed solution should be some thing that directly affects that issue.

Ok so I am not gonna read through all the crap at the beginning of this thread (sorry, spirited discussion or whatever you wanna label it I am one of those people who actually don't like Drama and seeing people argue. Some people get their kicks from it I don't) instead I am just gonna offer a small suggestion.

Everyone talks about what peacebringers are lacking. a LOT of it stems from a perception that their DPS is low both solo and on a team (though I might debate that.) So what if the secondary effect for all the PB powers were changed from -Def+KB to -Res+KB?

Most of us slot for -Rez in some of the attacks as is why not just carry it over to the whole power set? You get a mostly passive +Dmg boost to the whole team and a Dmg boost to your own powers as well. Would it be too much? Not likely.

It could be argued that other changes are needed also, but lets just start small and work our way up. If this one change were made would it be a decent step towards making the 2 Kheld's FEEL more equal?

From where I am sitting I think it would.