Nethergoat

oh yes, saw a guy in one of the globals on Freedom with a name that gave me a chuckle:

DontNerfMeBro


I'm assuming he was some sort of ss/fire brute..

set looks super cool.

can't wait to burn some packs chasing it.

also can't wait for the next round of wailing & garment rending from the but I'll only buy it from a STOOOOOOOOOORE crowd.

first thing that came to mind when I saw your reference to Arcanum (haven't thought about THAT game in a loooong time) was

Smith Piston

Or you could super it up by reversing it-

Piston Smith (with or without a 'the')

I love my crazy 88 brethren!

not a ton of Stone experience here, but my brute is 27 and I'm really enjoying him so far.

He may not be high enough for Granite yet, but he's certainly high enough for me to have become thoroughly disenchanted with Rooted. The movement pentalty & inability to jump is a ridiculous price to pay for status protection. It seems to me a relic of a previous regieme's balance ethos- remember when status protection on /inv meant you couldn't move at all? Game balance through player irritation/annoyance is an old philosophy that is happily largely extinct aside from a few remaining exceptions like Rooted.

Another old problem still present in /stone is incompatible toggles.
DA was originally a nightmare of incompatible toggles, which they eventually fixed.
Granite may be all that, but making it incompatible with all your other defensive toggles is an old, bad idea and it should be changed, even if that means reducing its stand-alone efficiency.

(the whole toggle thing HAS to be a Jack Emmert hangup- I remember when his "fun solution" to the 'problem' of Instant Healing was to make Instant Healing incompatible with Integration? *eyeroll*)

I'm having fun with the set and I'll keep playing it regardless, but those two old style design quirks strike me as the place to make whatever changes may come.

It's been quiet on the actual gameplay front this week. We've been having a hitting problem with my son & our response is a "no teevee/no videogames" ban after each outburst. Which is working, but every bump in the road cuts down on my potential CoH time.

Another thread inspired me to log in MANT, my plant/fire dom, to reacquaint myself. Alas, he was yet another victim of RESPEC FEVER- a couple of his attacks were patchily frankenslotted with generics and mismatched set pieces, most were empty.

So I've been slowly slotting him up on the fly while running occasional missions with the slider lower than usual. For some reason (probably related to the Crazy 88's) he only had 25m on him, which was *almost* enough to get him fully frankenslotted without having to exercise too much patience...but not quite.

Interesting note for marketeers/build enthusiasts:

by far his largest expense was salvage.
I didn't spend over 1m on any of the recipes, but reliably high prices on rare salvage & the general updraft on the prices of many Uncommons devoured most of his bankroll.

Happily, I recalled I still had a few odds and ends from Super Packs that I hadn't claimed yet- I pulled in a few off-brand ATOs (kheldian, Soldier of Arachnos) and insta-sold them for enough to finish his build.

He's still a lot of fun- I'd mostly stopped playing him after the last big change to Domination, which ne needed a respect to leverage. Apparently I did the respec, but then forgot to slot him out. =P

Got him up to level 40 over the course of the week, and will probably make him my default 'high level' guy to work on. I don't have a dom at 50 and he's my favorite of several I play, so it's time to tame my alt-itis and power on through with him.

My other 'main' this week was Scab Factory, who is a sort of perfect storm. Super fun to play, two sets I'm unfamiliar with so leveling is free of the foot-tapping yeah yeah yeah, let's hurry up and get to the GOOD powers! aspect, and one of those characters who I'm just completely satisfied with conceptually.
He's up to 27, mostly on the strength of running task forces as chronicled in this thread.

I did manage to run one terrific story arc, Vincent Ross'. Really enjoyable, in spite of 'starring' some really annoying factions- Legacy Chain & Wyvern aren't too bad on this guy but those Slag Golems are just a huge PITA.

But fun story, plenty of meat there for people who dig the lore side of the game, and several missions with terrific game mechanics- the Blood Crystal itself is a great, eerie artifact- the first time I ran into it I sat up straight and said "what the HELL is that!" I thought maybe my video card was going wonky on me. Very neat.

And the mission where you have to GO INSIDE the thing was fantastic, again in spite of those dang Slag Golems. I have to admit really liking these sorts of "fight off waves of attackers while the timer runs" missions- I forgot to turn my difficulty down, and +0/x3 was just about perfect on this arc. It was always close fought, I burned a lot of inspirations and died a couple of times, but had a great time doing it.

I'm saving the finale for tonight or tomorrow night, whichever affords me some uninterrupted time to pay them close attention.

Highly recommended arc, very fun.

The only other character I did anything with aside from marketeering was my ar/dev blaster The Big Payback. I'm running him through a bunch of random stuff at +0/X6 so I'll have a good feel for how he plays now and can compare and contrast after the I24 changes.

He's growing on me just slightly. Gun Drone in particular is better than I've been giving it credit for. Making it insta-cast was a major buff- the AI is still garbage, the damage is still insignificant, the duration is still too short, but the ability to just throw one out whenever you want is a useful PANIC BUTTON. It still needs a buff IMO, but now it has more utility than just being a set mule, which is a major improvement.