Nihilii

Take a look at your list. You're having a hard time naming anything other than AoEs, and you can't find any set with 2 ST attacks with 2.5+s animations other than EM. Now try to think about why people complain about corpseblasting. Do you believe we all are part of a secret conspiracy to slander the good name of Energy Melee, or is the more likely reason that having 2 long animating powers means one is going to spend a lot more time in long animations than with 1 long animating power?

The argument that one can just learn not to corpseblast doesn't work. If you don't bother using ET on TF on anything less than a boss, then you're using weaker attacks and not doing as much damage as your potential maximum. EM is barely on par with other strong primaries *if attacking at full speed*, (and ignoring ET's -hp). If you start to not use ET and TF, then you're doing lower damage ; it's irrelevant whether you corpseblast or not by this point, as the net result is still that you're weaker than you could be with another primary.

Additionally, and still, corpseblast is not a simple "yes or no" deal. If you deal 1000 damage with ET and by the time the power goes off, your target is down to 500 hit points, you've wasted half of your damage in overkill ; and, yet again, this isn't a binary thing: yes, other powersets can (and will) have overkill, the issue is that EM will have more of it.

I see that as a good balance point.

I believe you could create dummy characters on different servers as to have enough enhancement slots to store, and use e-mail afterwards to send them back to your main.

Kinetic Melee on brutes is lacking. The problem is that it was balanced as a scrapper powerset first and foremost, with brutes getting it as an afterthought: it relies heavily on self damage buffing to deal optimal damage.

As brutes already get Fury, the bonus is proportionally lower than for scrappers and final damage ends much lower. Even worse still, brutes inherently get lower mods on damage buffs.

Is this to say the set is unplayable on brutes and will melt your computer the second you try it? No, of course not, you can get through the whole game just fine. To give you an actual figure on the difference I'm talking about, using an identical attack chain of CS SB BB QS SB BB, with identical procs and everything, the brute will do 175 DPS and the scrapper 200 DPS. So, 1/8 damage loss, or 12.5%.

If anything, the psychological effect is more noticeable. The scrapper is going to buff himself to +150-160% from time to time and throw 800 damage concentrated strikes all over the place. The brute is going to have a hard time reaching 700 damage.

So I'm kind of dodging the question here, but that is to say that if you don't care about ludicrous survivability, going KM/Inv scrapper can make sense - as Inv is very sturdy regardless of which AT you pick, and the damage increase you'd get from that specific swap would be significant.

How does KM compare to other damage powersets? Well, it has a hard-hitting T9, a slightly better than standard damage PBAoE with a long animation, a cone that KBs, a so-so ranged attack, and 3 decent ST attacks. It's fairly good while leveling for ST DPS, as you get your aforementioned 3 ST attacks by level 4 and that's all you need to have a decent chain going. It's poor on AoE as realistically, you only get Burst to play with, with its 3 second animation and 8' radius. Super Strength, Claws, Stone Melee, War Mace, Axe, Dual Blades, Fiery Melee, Elec Melee all have you beat on that front ; or, to put it another way, the only worse sets for AoE output are Dark Melee and Street Justice.

On the bright side, Kinetic Melee doesn't force redraw, and coupled with Power Siphon, even though it does less on a brute that it would on a scrapper, that means any potential epic AoE you might add will work a bit better than it would on most other brutes. If you're willing to lock yourself in the specific pools with a 15 feet radius TAoE (soul, pyre, mu), your AoE output can be fairly decent by the time you're level 41 or so.

For the same reason, it can make sense to tie KM to a secondary with damaging powers, as you get more out of it thanks to Power Siphon and it helps mitigate the lack of AoE output from the primary.

That said, there's nothing wrong with Invul and KM/Inv can work just fine if you enjoy the animations. Just don't expect to keep up with SS/Fire or something.

After reading this post I went and tested it by slapping around Nosferatu with Gloom and Haymaker in AE, watching damage tics in a window dedicated to "damage inflicted" as to see any potential change that would be due to the -res going off, and indeed Reactive's -res doesn't seem to work anymore, at least on the 75% dot 25% -res version.

Took a look just now as I was curious and acc/dam HOs (nucleolus and synthetic nucleolus, level 50) are actually in the 30-50m range with last 5 sales all in the current day, so bidding for 30,333,333 inf should net you some quickly. While it is admittedly a hefty price compared to SOs, it remains well worth it in my opinion on a build that can't slot IOs.

Time is pretty nice indeed for that armored feeling coupled with a ranged attack powerset. Opens a whole lot of concepts.

I want Shield/Shield. The primary T9 would be Rain of Shields.

I never, ever ran into the situation of a PBAoE hitting less targets than an identical radius TAoE (let alone a smaller radius one!) myself as the mobs tend to be gathered in a neat circle around my own character.

Despite the server lights showing a significant increase of population over before F2P, I'm having a significantly harder time finding teams. I suspect this is because as zones are capped fast, having a % of the population unable to talk is going to reduce the available options for teaming, if one isn't proactive. Broadcast is often dead even though there's four instances of Atlas Park each of them with 50 players...

Before anyone suggests that, I'm not interested in forming my own team or joining a global chat channel. This is a mere statement of team availability before/after F2P for people who aren't willing to do that stuff.

-

I couldn't care less about RMT, I was here during the supposed worst parts and it was merely more than a blip on the radar, blown out of proportion by some forum goers. If you ask me, stopping F2P players from communicating in tells and broadcast is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Oh, well. They were at 10-20m a few weeks back. Maybe the prices did spike due to free players...

Excuse me while I go run some RSFs.

This may or may not be relevant to the conversation, but a free player can also slot HOs. Acc/Dam, Dam/Range and Heal/End are all relatively cheap and can do wonders on a SO build.

Shield.



GOD DEVS WHY CAN'T I PLAY SHIELD WITHOUT HAVING TO LIVE WITH SHIELD GFX AND ALTERNATE ANIMATIONS grumble grumble I'll go sulk in that corner, and reroll
another SR and whine about having lower res and HP and no fear protection
another inv and whine about having lower DDR and defense and no fear protection
another WP and whine about having lower DDR and defense

In addition to what was said above, Shield comes with a very strong aggro aura, that's one of the advantages of going brute rather than scrapper out, and doesn't hit any resistance or HP cap, that's another possible brute boon gone.

So, scrapper. Definitely.

Best way is to go brute, if you ask me. StJ does not rely on self damage buffing so doesn't take much of a damage hit by going brute (unless one is planning to go all out with Musculature, Assault and global bonuses), you may even see a significant increase from things not running away, getting more damage out of Burn and Blazing Aura, or even melee attacks generally (even a mere 100ms spent repositioning is a significant damage loss if your power animates in 1s).

If you're set on a scrapper, well, other people will have to help you. Never been able to make a /FA scrapper that worked myself, due to the aforementioned running issue coupled with the awesomeness that is Burn, leaving me to feel like I'm missing out by too much compared to what I could do on the brute version. The most prefered forum strategy seems to be softcapping to S/L, with perhaps some E/N defense. I prefer to go with 20% positionals and rely on lucks.

Captain Pedantic to the rescue!

Rep: "+" (as in plus sign) means higher level. "x" (as in multiplication sign) means bigger amount of mobs. Maximum amount of foes without increasing the level: +0/x8.

SS is in my opinion the strongest melee powerset, overpowered due to factors that either elude most people or that they choose to ignore.

Namely, Foot Stomp's radius, Rage buffing your tohit to absurd levels and your damage significantly (which essentially means any pool or epic attack will perform, out of the box, roughly ~25% better on a SS character than on most other primaries, and that will jump up to ~50% once you doublestack it) while being an easy to use, reliable click as opposed to a mob drain, KO Blow's range, damage and secondary effects, and the rest of the set being actually decent with KDs all over the place - hype would have you believe SS is balanced around perma-Rage, but if you take a look at the damage per recharge/endurance you will see SS powers are in line with similar powers from other primaries.

I've found the lack of AoE to be really noticeable in the late twenties. 1-20 flies by fast enough, but by level 25 and up until 32 I often find myself in situations where I wish I had an AoE. Possible solutions to alleviate the problem: use any XP boosting paragon reward power you may have in that level range. Sands of Mu. Spring Attack. Those are band-aids, but once you get to level 32, it's all worth it.

Kinetic Melee

Bug: Quick Strike has a 25% chance of doing 0.70 magnitude knockback, which ends up being knockback (rather than knockdown) against levels -1. That means an alpha levelshifted character will knockback level 50 foes routinely.

This is inconsistent with the description of the power itself, which states "a quick attack that sometimes knock foes down." as well as "33% KD" in the title info, and with similar single target attacks from other powersets, which have 0.67 magnitude knockback and won't knockback -1 foes.

Yes, it does.

Thank you for your hard work.

Just wondering: has anyone else run into performance issues using Mids since the I21 release? I'm often getting delays and overall jerkiness when selecting powers and placing slots. It's not something I could quantify properly, but I can tell the difference compared to the previous Mids versions (which I keep installed and, due to the above, end up using instead of the newest if I don't need I21 features for a particular build), so I'm wondering if it's just me, my hardware or whatever, or something other people have run into.

Biowraith is right on the money. I've never seen something as efficient as Dark Miasma at turning AVs into kittens, independently of the skill or possible lack thereof of your teammates (if any!). Throw in /sonic for the -res goodness, and they just melt. As an aside, -dam and -res seem to interact in an odd way that turn resistance buffs into goo. Normally, resistance resist resistance debuffs, but I've seen a dark/sonic dropping Reichsman while in Unstoppable to negative res by themselves.

Kin is great for the -damage, also for the often underrated Siphon Speed, which is set to be unresistable. That means stacking it a few times, you can make a significant dent in the attack speed of the AV, as well as push back their critical powers such as tier9s and nukes.

There should be an inf cap for premium players, as different tiers are supposed to unlock different increases to that cap. Tier 4 is 2 billion inf. It's likely someone who registered on the boards no later than 2005 has already unlocked that, unless a lot of that time was spent off the game.