Nihilii

Yeah, I'd do that. Points, money... I'd shell out a hundred bucks to be allowed to play Shield Defense without having to wear a shield or use alternate animations. Just give me the option to give you my money already!

Haven't read OP because I know the content: "we aren't tankmages".

The truth of the game is we are tankmages. Well, those of us who are mature enough to adapt to the rules of the game, and build and play properly. Manchilds who insist the rules of the game should be adapted to them personally are out of luck.

What's weird is, most childs realise by age ten or so "I am invincible, my super infinity shield reflects your attack forever and forever" and so on doesn't make for a sustainable approach to roleplaying with anyone but yourself. Teens eventually understand what it entails to deal with others, play a role in a society bigger than yourself.

...Then at the age most people are supposed to develop actual empathy and a much greater understanding of the entire world, some adults seem to think the word "roleplaying" is license to forget everything they learned and to regress to a particulary pouty and self-centered five years old.

What is wrong with you people?

Anyone who interprets roleplaying as "my personal story" should be blocked from the Internet for a month, and forced to play in a theatre troupe for that time.

Both powers are cones with the same animation length. Interesting.

Were you in a long fight against a single tough target? I find if I switch targets, moving from mob to mob because the guy I hit was killed basically, Sweeping Cross' animation isn't always shortened. Against a pylon (or anything where I can just stand still and mash keys) it becomes reliable.

Zero startup inf should do the trick. You are getting influence from kills too, enough to pay for salvage and then some.

Lusca has significant resistance to everything, so, being able to kill a tentacle doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to kill the head.

I painfully discovered that after spending a hour killing all tentacles...

I've had experience with 130-150ms (back when EU servers were in Germany), 220-240ms (current servers) and 300-350ms (oldschool west coast servers). As long as you ping under 250ms or so, latency hasn't a direct effect on sustained DPS as long as you queue attacks. Anything over that and you can start noticing lower damage output, as even with queueing your attacks won't chain perfectly.

Regardless, latency can pose problems with interruptible powers - i.e., I have to wait for half a second after my character has stopped to a stand still client-side to be able to start a hidden AS, whereas I know many US players can just run in and get it off instantly. One way to get around this is to spam the power, but you'll get the end cost loss from one interrupted attempt or two. Ditto with Aid Self.

Another downside is missing. Having to queue to get optimal DPS, and having to add latency to your own reaction time can make switching powers fast enough difficult; i.e., if AS misses right before CU and you want to swap to SC as to not waste the Hide proc. I can't manage it most of the time and have to eat the DPS loss of a non-crit CU followed by 2 SC to get back to a normal rotation.

This shouldn't be too relevant on a DB though seeing as your attack chain is static, and with ~220ms personally I've always been able to more or less match spreadsheet DPS ingame regardless of the character (except when my model was wrong, obviously ).

I don't remember the date, but I remember reading your post about it on the scrapper pylon thread either the day before or after I did my own testing.

The bug I'm talking about is not the queued/dequeued thing*, but something specific to Street Justice (in my very limited experience). Against a static target, Sweeping Cross activates in ~1s or below, rather than the 1.848s it's supposed to take; unless you miss, in which case the entire animation play out normally. It's like queueing the next attack skips the rooting part of the animation.

*then again, considering both bugs involve queueing, perhaps it is related; but specifically, I wasn't talking about the same symptoms here.

KM and SD both work significantly better on a scrapper, due to these powersets being designed to operate at a higher average damage buff level that is usual - Power Siphon for KM, Against All Odds for Shield.

Scrappers get more from damage buffs due to their higher base damage, and also have a better damage mod so their damage buffs give more.

The one usual significant advantage of brutes over scrappers, aggro control, is nullified by AaO, which is an extremely potent aggro aura.

Shield gets very close to scrapper caps on many stats, but doesn't quite reach it even IOed out, so the brute higher caps don't come into play save for outside buffs or Barrier if you choose to go that way (but it's arguable Rebirth +regen is a much better pick for a Shielder).

There is literally no performance reason to go brute on this particular combo, in my opinion. Scrapper all the way.

I find skill in CoH to be extremely easy to spot, but fairly hard to put in words. The key part would be not to deal in absolutes.

For example, a skilled player can and will use movement and positioning efficiently, but that doesn't mean someone jumping randomly is skilled.

Sticking to specific roles and rigid team compositions generally shows limited ability, but this doesn't necessarily imply someone doing things differently for the sake of being different is a good player.

And so on. I feel it's more about a million of individual things that a few overarching ones. Although of course, there are showstoppers. Nobody who says "we need [specific powerset or AT]" seriously is truly good at the game.

Build composition or social abilities don't factor into game skill to me, they're another category entirely.

I can run four instances of the game relatively smoothly on my computer with mere 4 gig of ram, provided I use /maxinactivefps 1 command on every window (obviously I am playing one of these windows at 60 FPS, I'm not just talking about running four instances and then idling), and lower graphics to minimum on every window but the main one, which is running with decent eyecandy. Sure, loading times are a bit longer than if I just run 1 or 2 windows, but not exceedingly so. Perhaps by a factor of 2.

I have a intel i3 2120 and a GTX 560 ti. All in all, that computer sold and shipped as a built unit cost me 700 euros, which I guess is something like $900-$1000? Computers tend to cost more in my country regardless, partly due to higher taxes and partly because manufacturers love to use the "1 dollar = 1 euro" conversion.

No real point there, save perhaps seeing as I can do this with 4 gigs of ram there doesn't seem to be a *need* for more, although it could certainly be convenient. Just sharing my personal experience.

Pulling Nightstar or Siege by spamming Taunt and sitting in line of sight is not helpful. They have very long range and will happily shoot you for a long, long time before coming to melee.

Spamming Taunt and standing still while someone else is pulling Nightstar or Siege correctly, by hiding behind geometry and pillars, is not helpful. You're either forcing him to taunt himself if he has it to maintain aggro, or outright breaking his pull, slowing things down for the entire league.

Spamming Taunt during the Nightstar or Siege fight is not helpful. You are making it harder for other meleers to grab aggro back when you have to move after two rings. With extreme cases of spamming and/or comparatively low aggro power from other meleers, the AV will also follow you out of debuff patches and forcing everyone to reposition.

Spamming Taunt during the first Maelstorm fight is not helpful. Much like with Siege and Nightstar, once you have to move away due to Marked for Death it's a mess; even more so as likely many other meleers will be forced to move away as well, so the pool of people able to grab aggro back is much smaller.

Spamming Taunt against a target right in front of you isn't helpful. As a tanker you have an aggro aura, and the first Taunt was more than enough to keep the mob glued to you. What would be much better is taunting those mobs 60 feet away who are protecting the terminals, so squishies can kill the technicians rather than be stuck having to deal with these. NOT spamming either, taunt once and move on to another mob.


...Yep, I know, I'm preaching to the choir, nobody here needs to hear this. Just had some really bad trials lately as a stalker and now blaster and I need to rant. Aggro control should not be available unless it's in my own hands, damn it!

I've always thought one of the best indicators something is overpowered is when people's overdefensiveness spills onto other, unrelated threads.

Hesh is making a joke.

...Perhaps so are you, but I can't see the funny part in your post, so, I'll be the guy who didn't get it.

As far as I understand it, it's not the height, it's the radius. Your power has a fixed radius regardless of what the GFX shows, and it is centered around the center of the target itself. So if the target is bigger than the power's radius, you're out of luck.

Okay, I burst out laughing looking at these haircuts.

Admittedly, this *is* how white kids of the age at which you'd join a gang arrange their hair nowadays.

...Can't we go back to the late 90s and stay there forever? Please?

Hmm. With relatively quick napkin math*, I'm getting 279 DPS for Ab AS Ab SS, and 284 DPS with Empower.

*specifically:
- assuming a 100% chance for AS stacks to build instead of... Whatever it is. For comparison purposes between the two chains this shouldn't matter.
- no degen.
- not considering Ageless; on that note, seeing as you're not gapless most of the time, it might make more sense to use Placate after BU AS Ab SS Ab AS... AS Ab SS Ab AS Placate is 7.788s, and BU lasts for 8.68s after its activation, so you should still be under BU's effect for your next Ab crit, and it would remove a single gap.

What might make Empower not as good as it may seem is Placate eating 1.584s of BU (of which there is already only 8.68s, due to BU's own animation time). So the +20% damage buff is partially cancelled out with, if you average it, a 8% damage buff loss.

Throwing degen in, it seems possible to me the Empower chain would mean less degen stacking and result in less DPS. Not sure it should account for that much of a difference, and of course this wouldn't match with ricohdah's experience anyway.

Uhh. Basically, just a lot of words to say "I got nothing".

Your kid is adorable.

I don't have the BU instarecharge proc myself, and I have run into this issue, so there has to be something else.

I got enough to craft Degen T4, so I went and tried the left side before making a choice.

Results:

02:44 -> 361 DPS
02:59 -> 342 DPS
02:37 -> 372 DPS
03:12 -> 327 DPS
02:46 -> 358 DPS

This was without Hybrid. Obviously, this got me thinking. It's almost in the same range as my times with Hybrid ON and the DoT Degen T3!


Hopped on I24 Beta to be able to test and compare the T4s, but it didn't make for a very convincing experience. There are MAJOR bugs in I24. Sweeping Cross activates instantly almost all the time against a pylon. Queued attacks sometimes stop being queued - unless you mash the keyboard like the maniac, in which case they stay queued perfectly. So, don't mistake the following improvements of these numbers, compared to my Live runs, for a mere result of the PPM changes, there's also something else, something weird, at play.

With Degen T4 75% DoT:

01:49 -> 479 DPS
02:14 -> 413 DPS
01:50 -> 476 DPS
02:06 -> 432 DPS
01:52 -> 470 DPS

(Average: 454 DPS)

With Degen T4 75% -hp:

01:45 -> 492 DPS
02:04 -> 437 DPS
01:53 -> 467 DPS
02:02 -> 442 DPS
01:40 -> 511 DPS

(Average: 470 DPS)

So the -HP seems better even at T4 for this particular build... If I am to trust these results. Which I don't think I should entirely, given the aforementioned issues and the limited length of each test. What's more likely is that going one way or the other probably doesn't make too much of a difference.


Edit: just for fun, I used a chain without CU to see how bad SC is broken; basically, AS SB HB SC repeat, with a small unknown gap as my recharge in AS (4.17s) isn't sufficient to chain this with bugged SC.

01:54 -> 464 DPS
02:04 -> 437 DPS

StJ/Ice, same setup and attack chain as before, now with endurance accolades. Icy Bastion seems to be enough to sustain my endurance needs now, as long as I don't get unlucky with end procs.

Musc T3, Degen T3 (75% DoT)

04:21 -> 274
03:28 -> 312
03:09 -> 330
03:36 -> 305
03:27 -> 313

...I managed to get killed by a pylon, between run #1 and #2. I tend to let my luck ride after I get hit once, and only use a mitigation click if I see a connected hit icon popping up under my HP bar, but I was one second too late and died while activating Hoarfrost. Embarrassing!

Edit: unlocked Hybrid, had enough to craft T3, went for the far left side (55% chance to get +dam, 3 stacks).


Hybrid on
02:44 -> 361
02:43 -> 363
02:46 -> 358
03:05 -> 335
02:25 -> 392

Hybrid off (passive boost)
03:29 -> 311
03:32 -> 309
03:28 -> 312