NightSable

Good question.

Devices - Not too many changes, but here is what I would do. I love devices, but it needs some love to make it comparable to other blaster secondaries. These are in no particular order.

(1) Targeting drone, I would change it to have extra damage to all snipes with a 10% chance to scourge per corrupter rules.
(2) Smoke bomb - Useless as is. Buff it with a Confuse. Enemies surrounded by smoke would know something is up, but it may create friendly fire as well.
(3) Cloaking Device - Needs increased defense to make it worth considering or maximal stealth so you dont need SS with it to be invis. I actually vote getting rid of this altogether though and creating a device called Hologram. This would create a duplicate of you (or for coding, perhaps just a phantom army hologram) that does not attack or cause damage, but has a single powerful AOE taunt that can be slotted for. This would be useful for setting up trip mines or even time bomb (which I will come to). Stealth IO's really replace cloaking device, so a hologram to call enemies over to a mine field makes a lot of sense and is thematic with devices. Also, it could potentially help teams as well as the blaster.
(4) Webnade - Give it a small DOT componant (like net is tightening - smashing dam) OR make duration double
(5) Caltrops - Give a small -to hit debuff. Hey, you step on those things and try to shoot someone. Yes, I would give the same -to hit debuff to the knives and others that use them.
(6) Trip Mine -Leave alone, but if change, give some good old fashioned targeted AOE frag grenades
(7) Taser - Leave alone or exchange - it's love or hate on this power, so I would probably just leave alone.
(8) Time Bomb - Worst power with best potential. Create the power sticky bomb, which has been suggested before. Basically, the blaster needs to walk up to an enemy, and literally place the bomb on them (no interrupt issue). The bomb then has a 5 second timer on it before exploding. It could be something similar to when red cap bosses throw the little red cap suicide bomber on you. This would be fun and make the power more useful.
(9) Gun Drone - the buffs on gun drone actually were pretty good with its mobility, so I would not change it except to eliminate the need to resummon it, or lower the endurance use to summon, so minor change.

if I could change only one power, I would change Time Bomb, as it is a great nuke when solo, but I think a sticky bomb placed by a stealther could be as effective solo and it is more team friendly in my above description. My second choice would be cloaking device and changing it to a hologram power. The first choice is the most needed. The second choice is the cooler idea though. If one of those was changed, I would roll a new /devices immediately.

I like the ninja run and costume.

Now give us what we really want. Thongs!!!!

Hey folks. I'm a republican and all, but not a Sarah Palin fan. I think her book name taints Issue 17.

I can't wait though to see the Praetorian Sarah Palin's running around.

MM's got the ability to upgrade all their pets now with the one click (two for the 2nd upgrade)which is awesome. I remember my bots/ff and I was buffing my bots, making me a buffbot in two ways (upgrades and shields), and hating it. Eventually, I came to the light and only buffed assault bot with shields and the spent long periods of time setting up to get the other upgraded. So a belated thank you to the devs for this improvement.

So here is a suggestion... (/e puts flame-retardant suit on and has three fire extinguishers aimed at self)

Based on the above dev behavior, consider some changes to some of the individual buffs (not all of them). All shield placement buffs (sonic, force field, thermal, cold) could be changed to a single click PBAoe buff (much like Gather for RA or AM) that runs on an equivalent timer with no ability to recharge (stack buffs). Set a dispersion bubble like graphic, or some variant and have a click that can go off every time the power runs out. This means the entire team can gather quickly for shields, and then move enabling the support character to do other more useful things and likely would encourage people playing those ATs more (how many /sonic and /force field does anyone see these days). Increased the end use of the power some, but that really is not a functional issue in game play.

Also, speed boost and increase density should function the same way for kins.

Individual healing powers, forge, hoarfrost, etc... would obviously should not be changed as they are meant for one individual (maybe two) at a given time, and would be too uber to upgrade to a PBAoe team buff. The other buffs I mentioned before however would not overpower anyone, and allow players to actually play more.

Wow thanks for all the advice. I'll need to digest this for a bit to see if it is worth going on. It is true that I did not keep up with all the new PVP diminishing returns as I am looking to return to PvP and usually I like to start new projects froms scratch just for the heck of it. Typically my projects are either damage dealers, or support specialists. Likely, I would play in zones, but arena is fine with team. I would team in any case as I would really be useless solo, and I think the idea was to find a team that would capitalize on my ability to knock people down. Perhaps I'll start a sg called "Kick em while their down" and bother fiteklubbers (love the term) who try to do it in the zone.

Hi PvPers,

So I like to sometimes mess with some non-FOTM builds for things. I noticed bubblers are just slowly disappearing in general. Given the KB fun that is out there now in PvP, the idea of a mind/bubbler came to me as potentially interesting. I am sure I am not the first to think of this, so I looking for a bit of help with regards to PvP.

This toon would be made for zone (and team - if I even have to say it) pvp. The goal would be to knock people on their *** and create a world of mez hell for people.

My thoughts on mind were pretty much take most of the powers. From the bubble side of things, force bolt (slotted with KB and perhaps recharge - IOs to be determined eventually).

So I had a bunch questions, and pardon me if some are obvious. I have not really done much PvP for a couple of years, and i found out my one time great ice/cold corr sorta sucks now. Apologies in advance for lots of questions, but the experiment and goal here seemed like an interesting concept.

(1) Is PFF useful in PVP? It's my tier one, so no real choice, but question of slotting.
(2) Does dispersion bubble provide adequete mez/kb protection for pvp ( I play on Freedom)?
(3) What slotting for Levitate and Force Bolt is recommended IO-wise?
(4) Is the detention bubble useful in PvP? Does it actually work on anyone?
(5) Does Terrify have a use and how would you slot it?
(6) Epic choice recommendations?
(7) For shields, in PvP, do they help teammates enough to matter. I would get them for a Pve build, but for the PvP build, if they don't help, I may skip as I hear defense isn't too useful in PvP. If you and I were on the same team, would you be expecting me to bubble you in otherwords.
(8) Finally, any slotting recommendations for TK.

Once again, as a KB specialist, I am not interested in being an uber damage machine. I just want to find some folks to team up with to provide support in the form of damage mitigation called KB. I know I could go FF/Energy Def, but I'm not a fan of playing fenders personally and I would likely PvE with an alt build for TF's and stuff. I like trollers, and I know Mind has some decent single target damage. Also, TK is just too much fun.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the tip about clicking English. Problem solved and now I change my tune. The new boards is easier to navigate now.

Thanks board gurus.

Sorry, but I am not sure where to post this.

Dev's, the new boards look pretty, but they suck. I hate them. Please revert to old format. I like the old ones as I can scroll through them quicker and easier. With this one, I need to know where I am looking. This was a huge mistake you can still rectify. Issue 15 was lame, but the boards reformatting sucks even more. At this point, it may be worth leaving things alone in fact for the whole game. You are only making things worse.

The KIOSKS ARE BROKEN. ZOMG!!!!!

Next thing you will tell me is that the Cathedral of Pain doesn't work.

What was your favorite Pvp toon that got nerfed to near oblivion?

I had a Ice/Cold Corr that used to PWNZ. Now, it's laughable.

P.S. Wait till they change animations in Psi Blast again and screw it up for Pvp. DOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

Here are two claws/SR scrappers duking it out in what must be Warburg. Watch as they seek and destroy. Warning: Extreme Violence, and a lot of flurry (so must be issue 14 or 15).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjARS...eature=related

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How much Accuracy (on powers and global) is required to hit fairly well in PvP? (like 3/5 ratio.)



[/ QUOTE ]

I would say that oodles of accuracy is really needed for Pvp. Oodles and oodles.

Well, blasters are only over-powered for PvP if you choose not to play a blaster. If you take the blasters out of the equation, then it all works itself out just fine.

Hah!!! Worst reply to worst 1st post ever.

We need to figure out this happened and exploit it to control the price early on only to watch the price drop from over-exploitation.

Seriously, gratz on the payout. In theory, you should post your 1 billion dollar pvp build, or has the price now gone to 5 billions suddenly. Hmmmmm.

More people play on freedom that aren't farming than actually play on the other servers total. Freedom badge and freedom tf global channels as well as the right supergroup can find people that play the game.

Also, start a static team on any server. That can help too, but you need to find 7 other players that like to play when you do which can be tougher than it sounds, even on freedom.

Farming is necessary for the survival of most nations, industrialized or not. Farming provides affordable and reliable commodities for continued growth and expansion. Our nation would be nothing without farming.

It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Anyway, growing up, I never wanted to be a farmer and I still don't. I am happy people farm. In the game, it is no different. It allows me to sell common salvage for millions of influence, and I keep my vault loaded as the market fluctuates.

I think the conspiracy theory that the devs are geniuses however is about as accurate as saying the FED planned the recession to lower the overvalued prices of housing. They had no clue at all what there actions would lead to. Hopefully, they will learn along the way.

Surely, there is some economics grad student who is playing the game who can provide some educationed insight versus some 5th grader who games so much, he is still in remedial mathematics.

Some PhD student should do some economics experiments on the market and watch how it models real life situations. That would be a interesting dissertation.

No, wait a second. The devs are geniuses. They just duped me and most of the other players into thinking they were clueless when all along, they just planned this since issue 4.

The dev's AT is mastermind. By the way, i only posted this so in one year, hydraulic pistons would cap at 4 million a piece before the great crash, and the post's impact will only be understood then.

Signed,

Bored at Work and unable to play at work.

Actually this video sums it up for all of em and great scrapper music attached.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpFSzELg7Pw

Here's Mud in Your Eye!!!!

Damn all this hate.

It's time for a traps/sonic defender superteam. 8 FFG makes a roaming group of tankmages.

Electric Melee Scrappers. Lightning Rod.

Spawning you own 8 man maps with no need for fillers.

BOING!!!!!!!!!

This may be one a lot do not know about, but I like Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's They Live!!!. He goes into a bank and says, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick [censored]...and I'm all out of bubblegum." He then uses a shotgun (OK, blaster like), and shoots a bunch of aliens.

This type of movie quote really captured the essence of scrapperdom than statements like that.

I'm going to second Brandon Lee in The Crow as a Dark Melee scrapper, but with another quote. Eric Draven states as he is close to death... "I have something to give you. I don't want it anymore. Thirty hours of pain all at once, all for you."

Best Scrapper moment to me is from a cult Korean classic called OLDBOY. Basically, OLDBOY gets a hammer and is stuck in a hallway with well, everyone. He basically fights his way through and demonstrates what street fighting would look like if it was a power set. He ain't graceful, and takes his hits (willpower), but as you see in the end, he kinda kicks [censored].

Check it out on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufss5ot_vGE

The best advice I can give you is to post what your goals with the character are, i.e; pvp (zone vs arena) vs pve, solo vs team, AE vs mish, specific task forces skills. Second post your characters current economic situation. Starting with nothing, 2 -3 million, 10 mill, 1 billion, infinite, etc...

Do this before the real heavy hitter archery sorts find this thread.

Going with a neutral based build however with an estimated 10-20 million to spend, I would drop fly, but keep hover (eventually slot three high levels flight speeds - it will be fast and make you happy in battles). Add hasten and SS, and buy or get lucky and find a stealth IO to achieve full invisibility. Hasten will help you lay trip mines more often (does not speed up animation, but you can get a larger minefield out if needed). I would drop explosive arrow as well (subpar damage and scatters groups). You still have 4 slots as I removed fly and explosive arrow and added hasten and SS.

With those 4 slots, pick up caltrops. This will help to keep enemies from running over the trip mines too quickly, and make your mine fields much better.

Slot # 2, I would pick up ranged shot. Range is your friend. You can actually easily drop a lieu with a ranged shot and blazing arrow combo before they get into range.

Slot #3, Time bomb. That's correct timebomb. It is a nuke that does not effect your end bar basically, and makes a great opener. Great for solo or for patient teams. If you place a time bomb, and then count 7 full seconds and click trip mine, you just double bombed them. Once again, great solo, situational on teams. You can also place at feet of mobs and then run around corner and use ROA if you time it correctly. Many people hate timebomb, but i would consider it. You asked above about planting of trip mines, and cloaking device and smoke grenade may work, but it is not guaranteed. Go for the SS if you want zero risk.

Slot #4 now If you cant get a stealth IO, then cloaking device is needed. If you can get the IO, then I would get recall friend. You are invisible with SS and stealth IO, so it is helpful in tf's to be able to stealth to end of some mishes and port folks. Other considerations include combat jumping to put some juicy IO unique in and greater mobility in battle.

I agree with hover, so if stuck on fly, that is cool, as it is a personal choice. I would still grab hasten. I think taser and stunning shot are no good. You are ranged and can do great damage. The whole perma stun the boss trick will take longer than just killing him with two snipes or a trip mine + blazing arrow. Not a fan of it persoanlly, but it does have its uses. A fully slotted AIM buffed blazing arrow will take down a minion and so will a ranged shot. Both together should drop a lieu and may get some bosses that sensitive to lethal. This is assuming +0 however. Either way, the minion is gone. I used to blazing arrow one minion and ranged shot another when solo, leaving the lieu alone or the lone minion alone.

If you want to Pvp and it can be done well actually, then state that as it brings up a whole new bunch of issues to discuss.

Good luck. Archery and Devices is great thematic pairing and can work well together.

Line breaks are suggested by big meanies in PvP who kill me.

As for the lvl 34 after 3 years, follow the guide and you can get to lvl 60. I guarantee it. Good job on the big jugs though. It is important that people take you serious when you play a video game where you pretend to be hero.

Love,

Night Sable

Step 1: Make a character. Hot Random on the costume, or make a girl with ginormous breasts in a pink bikini and high heels. Pick your heal power, it will be easier to find teams. If you can speed boost, it will be even be easier to find teams, so make that your primary goal. Defender or Troller. It won't make a difference for you. As for the troller primary or defender secondary, pick whatever. No one will even care anyway. Pick something that is pretty if possible.
Step 2: Go to Atlas Park. This is important, so pay attention. There are other zones, but they are without other heroes, so they are kinda scary. Stay in Atlas where there are lots of heroes to protect you.
Step 3: Spam AT lfAE team or lf AEfarm until you get on a team. This is the hardest part at low levels, but once you get SB, you are golden.
Step 4: Don't speak much until you get some levels. Some team members may quit if they see you are level 2 or 3, but if you don't draw attention to yourself, you will appear to be level 50 when inside the mish and people may not check. It is really important that people don't figure out you are clueless
Step 5: Don't get travel powers. You never have to leave Atlas Park, so it would be a waste. In fact, they really need to put the trainer in the AE building so you don't have to waste time getting to Ms. Liberty. Get Jump Kick though as it will open up SJ if you want it at level 50, but it really not going to do anything unless you want to jump really high. As a kin, you can get a jumping power too, so that way you could even get two jumping powers. That's twice as much jump. You could consider getting leadership pools, but since you probably wont be near the team much, it really won't help and those just make weird symbols float around you, and then you could interfere with the look of your random costume you set up from step1.
Step 6. Get speed boost as soon as possible. Use it on the guy or gal with the star often. Ignore the other team members after the beginning of the mish unless they are a stone tanker. The rest of the team may ask for SB. This can get to be really irritating and selfish of the other heroes. That's OK, some of them are just little kids, and you know how kids can be. SB a few members here and there when they ask, but don't do the whole team. It does not last long anyway, so then you would have to speed boost often with repetitive motions. You need to worry about carpal tunnel, and its long term effects on your quality of life, so if people give you a hard time, remember, you need to take care of yourself first. Also, try not to use your attacks much. They will just get you in trouble and tick off the maniacs in the mission.
Step 7: When you get fulcrum shift, try not to use it too much. It is a neat looking power, but then you have to stand close to the granite tanker and he is big and ugly. Ugly people suck.
Step 8: As you obtain higher levels, sb any granite tankers you see and tell them to friend you. You do not need to add em as friends on facebook, but in the game you can actually friend people. It is cool. If they don't answer you, they are big and mean and may have ignored you for spamming way back 4 hours ago when you were level 1. If they friend you, you will always get invites when you log on.
Step 9: Go AFK and get some dinner. You are probably hungry and have been on line now for 8 or 9 hours. Eat something really healthy like Pizza or french fries or both. Remember earlier how I said to take care of yourself. And do your laundry. No reason not to be hygenic after all. The team really does not have a need for you, but knowing a kin is on the team will make them fight more confidentally. Don't work too hard to make dinner and do chores. You need to maintain your gamer's body after all. A little extra fat will cushion your wrists and may even protect the the nerve compression from carpal tunnel syndrome.
Step 10. Ding, you hit 50. Awesome. You deserve it totally. Immediately quit the team, even mid mission and log this character off. You have no idea how to use the character anyway and there is no point in learning now. Just make an empath, and start spamming healer lf AE farm. You will have another 50 in a couple of days. That's two 50s. Totally Awesome.

So that is it. I see a lot of fancy guides where people crunch the numbers and such and that is awesome, but I am more of a tactics kind of guy. I am sure some folks will have feedback and that is just super duper, but it is hard to make a more accurate guide than this. If people want to make addendums, that would be greatly appreciated, but it's really hard to make a more precise and well thought out guide than this (Except that damn archery one, that one is the shizznit). Also, I really did not want to provide the purpled out IO build at this time, because those damn PvP'ers will just copy the build on my Kin/Psi Defender and then Pwnz everyone in Recluse's Victory. PvPer's attack me when i screw up and wonder into recluse's victory and they are big meanies. Builds are also overrated. Real heroes don't spend all their influence on purples and IO recipes. They just collect it to be really really rich and sometimes hold random costume contests. You could also buy all the inanimate carbon rods from WW and drive the cost up to amazingly inflated prices that make no sense if you wanted. That would be neato and people love the challenge of building simple IOs for like 500K. That reallly seems to enhance the gaming experience.

I forgot to mention, you should start on Freedom first as it will be easiest to find a farm, but no worries if you go to another server. They all do it, just might slow you down to 12 or 14 hours, and that would suck, because you need to finish up in time for late night Cinemax and all there artsy shows.

Anyway, follow these 10 simple steps, and you will be well on your way to glory and you will totally feel like a super hero. A super duper hero in fact.

Some may say, Night Sable, this really can't work. Well, there are always naysayers. Folks say "AE ruined the game" and things like "farming is lame" and so on. But if you follow these 10 steps, you could have all sorts of kins from fire/kins to ice/kins to kin/rads to kin/archery. The combinations are practically limitless. Perhaps a number cruncher can do the math.

Good luck, and I hope to see you all get to 50, and then I can join up with you on some shadow shard tfs. That would be just awesome as I am sure you will totally know what you are doing by that point.

I love you all except those PvP meanies that kill me. Stupid dummyheads.


Love,

Night Sable

P.S. How much you want to bet someone follows the guide to 50?

AE has ruined game play? In what other game do you get to kill smurfs and kittens and be called a hero? When I first picked up the game, I used to feel a real sense of emptiness in the pit of my soul as I took my first scrapper to 50. No sense of pride. I was like, well, I'm 50 and I'm pretty darn good, but I have not killed papa smurf. I have not killed an army of kittens. Now, I can finally sleep well at night knowing that I have taken by broadsword and split the head of papa smurf, smurfette, brainy, etc... Bet you can't do that in champions.

Ok, too sarcastic maybe?