Nihilii
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Posts
2861 -
Joined
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I like Assault, although I team a lot which skew things a little - still, I do use it even when soloing.
It's not a particulary great damage boost for the amount of endurance it costs, but if you have a power pick and some endurance to spare, it's still a little bonus. -
Gloom Shadow Punch Smite Siphon Life Smite will do more damage for about the same recharge.
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Too broad of a question to answer accurately without being able to see the whole build, but I'm going to make the following assumptions :
1/ Your endurance is fine, or at least fine enough to let you solo AVs.
With Shadow Punch low endurance cost it's doubtful switching end for a proc would suddenly break your end usage, unless you were barely sustainable and already ran low on end by the time fights ended.
2/ The recharge is irrelevant for your usage - as you're saying you use it to fill gaps here and there, and it has a 3s base recharge, I suppose it's always up when you need it and actually even more than you need it.
Assuming that, we can rule out recharge as a problem as well.
3/ You're ED capped in damage.
A normal proc in Brute Shadow Punch is roughly worth 43% damage enhancement not affected by ED, and a purple proc is roughly worth 100% damage enhancement not affected by ED, so for the purpose of ST DPS over long durations, it gets better to slot a proc at around the 80% damage enhancement mark.
Most likely you could probably swap whatever that Mako is for a proc and come out on top. Note that the increase in DPS won't be necessarily big, i.e. if you use Shadow Punch every 10 seconds you'd get an increase of ~1.5 DPS with a normal proc (20% chance to do 74 damage more or less averages at 15 damage per use). On the other hand if you use SP every 3 seconds and stick a purple proc in it you'd see an increase of ~11.7 DPS.
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That was to answer your question, but you might be better off thinking about your attack chain before caring about procs. Concept build no MG no Hasten, fair enough ; if anything that makes it all the more important to optimize what it is you've got. I suppose you've got Smite, Gloom and Siphon Life, and as you mention you only use Shadow Punch to fill gaps every now and then I'm worried you also use Shadow Maul as part of your regular ST attack chain (which isn't too efficient).
I hit the quota on wild guesses for tonight though, so I'll leave it at that. -
The quick brown fow jumped over the lazy dog the quick
Quote:Either way works for me !I can't tell if this thread is trolling poor typists or people who don't think the new TFs are all that hard. -
Quote:Fast, tiny, efficient are relative words. That most people who have experience with both think the CoH launcher is efficient and the NCSoft launcher is slow and bloated should tell you all you need to know.
I have no experience with the NCSoft launcher, but the current CoH launcher is none of the things you summed up. It actually uses a lot of resources for what it does. -
I found my invul scrapper to be just fine and useful for both Apex and Tin Mage (we usually don't run with tankers and more often than not I end up being the one taking the brunt of the aggro). With judicious insp use (oranges against pylons, the occasional green if a few clockworks get lucky at the same time as a war walker) I usually don't die in either TF.
That being said, I disagree with this :
Quote:I've never had trouble keeping aggro 100% of the time on both BM and Director 11 (the only times I lose it is when my Shield friends are playing, as scrapper AaO will strip aggro from scrapper Invinc). The key to this is mobility, so any tanker save for Granite should be just fine. If you're quick on your feet, there's no reason to lose aggro in either encounter.Both Battle Maiden and Director 11 are essentially untankable encounters. Battle Maiden simply cannot be properly tanked, and trying to hold aggro on Director 11 is at minimum inconsistent with a master run.
If anything, these encounters are one of the few where, IMHO, having a tanker would be sustantially better than a scrapper/brute. In usual tank-and-spank immobile encounters jumping in first with a scrapper aggro aura is all you need to take and hold the aggro. Here, things are scattered and you have to move, so the superior aggro tools (and eventually focus) the tanker get can matter. Holding Battle Maiden and the swords/humans or Director 11 and the scattered malta is something my scrapper just can't do, and the level 54 swords/humans or maltas will be enough to sometimes get a kill on squishies on non-stacked teams. Add to that tankers get that juicy 20% res debuff that doesn't scale down with purple patch, which looks more and more attractive when you consider that, i.e., a defender Enervating Field would only be a 13.5% res debuff in the same situation (+4 foes).
Moving on to another use for tankers/melee alts in Apex, I find having someone that jumps right on top of the sword (on the roof) and warrior (down below) ambushes before they have time to scatter is at the same time safer for the team and more efficient as AoEs will get rid of the ambush quickly, whereas I've seen teams taking minutes to take down one scattered ambush simply because it's level 54 and people end up running as much as hitting.
Apex is in my opinion one of the most interesting TFs for melee characters, if you stand still without thinking you're going to get splattered (unless you've got an extremely strong character or lots of insps/buffs), but the faster you react and the harder you work the more efficient you are. Bit of a paradigm shift compared to the rest of the game so I can understand people who dislike it, but I don't think the "melee = useless" comments are true.
Back to the actual topic, if I'd plan a hypothetical no insps, no team buffs/debuffs/heals tanker for these TFs, I'd probably go with Ice on Tin Mage (slow res) and Fire for Apex (tox res), but I think player reaction time and fast movement/maneuverability (that is to say, for me that's CJ + Hurdle, YMMV) make a bigger difference here than between the worst and the best powerset choices. -
Funnily enough, everything you listed as great are the reasons I don't enjoy this trial much... Or other "skill", team-based tasks in online video games.
When you think about it the level of coordination required for the Sewer Trial is ridiculously low (albeit higher than on most other tasks ingame). What can make it hard is the tools we are given to communicate are vastly inferior to real life equivalents (i.e., simply talking outloud).
Because of that, basic coordination can be challenging, but that's challenge in the sense that you have to fight against the clunkiness of a videogame interface - by which I mean not only typing is slower than talking for most people, but you can't play/fight at full efficiency while doing so, and worst of all there's no guarantee other players are reading your text at all and/or reacting nearly as fast as they could.
In other words, this is akin to challenge yourself by tying one hand behind your back. Some will have a blast doing that, some will find that ultimately boring. -
I'm with you on that one. I've seen a fair amount of people disappointed at how short the new TFs are, but personally, I like that length. It's much more casual and at the same time more interesting, because all the usual filler parts in TFs are gone with only the hardest battles left.
I think one of the reasons so many people speed through TFs is because 1 hour or longer is just too much of a time commitment. With 2-3 missions TFs, that problem is gone. -
I doubt I could reach 1:30 either. That brute of yours is really impressive.
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Everything you listed is routine gameplay and shouldn't pose a difficulty to any scrapper secondary, much less WP or SD.
Edit : that was in reply to mauk2's experience in a pug ITF. -
Here's an idea : why don't people who dislike buffing just play other powersets, rather than try to nerf buffing powersets for everyone?
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Mother Mayhem prior to GR didn't do any non-positional, all she had was psy blast attacks. I don't know if this changed or not.
The psychic Clockwork King doesn't have any non-positional, it's all psy blast. Psy Babbage doesn't either, remember Will Dom looks like Domination.
Giovanna and Vanessa only have Domination (also Total Dom, but it doesn't do damage), so they do much less than Malaise.
I can't think of any AV doing as much (much less more) non-positional psi as praetorian Malaise... -
Quote:Irrelevant. I didn't include DM numbers in the numbers I posted.
Careful, DM boosts SD's survivability a LOT and patches the heal/regen hole the set has. -
Quote:DC on multiple targets is all it needs to be sustainable in actual gameplay, really.
And you skipped Conserve power.... so how are you doing it? -
Quote:Performance of random PuG people means as little as performance of random forumites.
Especially would like to hear your take on Invuln. I've seen many /Invuln scraps eat dirt quickly on ITFs. I'm still trying to figure out what benefits, if any, /Invuln actually offers over /SD, /SR, or /WP.
Seriously though, invul offers a reasonable amount of DDR (50%), great S/L resistances (70%ish), decent resistances to everything else but psi (30%ish), great maxHP (capped), and if you build for the S/L softcap with one foe in range, any additional enemy will give you a buffer against defense debuffs. I think I haven't died in an ITF on my invul for months if not years, and I TF daily.
More importantly for teaming, much like SD it offers (over SR or WP) a very strong aura that will keep stuff on you by simply walking next to them, no matter how hard crazy fire blasters might try to grab the aggro ; and when teaming, you often get defense buffs putting you way above the softcap and heals, at which point having good maxHP and good resistances are the best way to improve your damage mitigation. -
I'd go with the SS/Fire brute and never look back.
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For a gapless GC - GD - GC - SD, you need :
+250% recharge in GD
+135% recharge in SD
+90% recharge in GC -
Example build for DM/SD, this assumes using the rech/heal uncommon :
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Shield actually has more resistances than WP for everything but S/L and psi, although I often see Shield builds making (what I think is) the mistake of not slotting for resistances.
My shielders approximately end up with 45% def to all, 80%+ DDR, 35% S/L res (70% during T9), 20% F/C/E/N/T res (40% during T9), 30% slow res, 2000hp (2300 during T9), 300% regen and an AoE KD every 30 seconds.
On the other hand, I've never managed to softcap WP to everything but psi (let alone with psi) while keeping the same level of recharge and optimal individual power slotting as I would with a Shield build having the above stats. As for other numbers, it's usually like 50% S/L (capped at 75% during T9), 8% F/C/E/N/T (23% during T9), 30% psi res (45% during T9), 2250hp, 700% regen (bumping up to 1200% with enough foes around), 20% DDR, no slow res, no additional tool.
Outside of heavy psy enemies lacking defense debuffs, and before considering the stronger aggro aura, the stacked mez protection and the added damage, Shield is a clear winner for me. -
Unless you need the character slot for a new alt, I don't see the point. It doesn't hurt to keep the character around, you might change your mind a few months down the line and enjoy playing it again.
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I dislike the NCSoft launcher enough that it might be the tipping point for me to decide whether I'll keep my sub up or not whenever I get annoyed by the game for whatever reason.
I suppose it sounds a bit like a "I'll leave and take my 38 accounts and my SG of 4700 friends with me!" empty threat, but I'm not shaking fists or calling the devs names here, just saying despite how much I like this game, I might consider leaving it because of the launcher. It's that bad, or at least was that bad on my particular computers when I used it. -
I'm not too fond of his build, but frankly :
1/ Slotting Granite with 3 level 50 defense IOs and 3 level 50 resistance IOs over his slotting gives a whooping extra 1% def and 3% resistance.
2/ No disagreement here, I'd switch the end mod/acc for a regular end mod IO.
3/ That's a rather silly statement, LoTGs are the most efficient way to get recharge. 1 slot, 7,5% recharge, nothing else comes close. The money bit can't even be an excuse now that absolutely anyone over level 20 can get a LoTG every 4 days.
4/ Replacing every imp armor with 2 aegis when possible in his build, you end up with an additonal 1.4mph, going from 19.4 to 20.8 in granite. Hardly a significant increase.
5/ Maneuvers is a good and easy way to get 3.5% def to all for yourself and your whole team, if you slot more efficiently, you won't have endurance problems with it.
6/ Energy Torrent is great indeed.
7/ A tanker with minerals would be indeed with psi clocks and crazed. No "etc.", because those are more or less the only mob factions where you find yourself against heavy psi damage but not a whole lot of exotic, and you only find those factions if you play old story arcs. Hell, I don't think I would have ever seen psi clocks and crazed for the past 2 years if I didn't run Tina and Maria for accolades.
8/ Even when defdebuffed, a granite can handle cimerorans just fine thanks to 90% S/L res plus eventually EE and Rooted. A granite tanker going for 55% def to all would have to make tremendous sacrifices heavily reducing his performance in other areas.
"Horrible"? Bit of an overstatement, it looks like a valid way to build (one I wouldn't follow personally, but I can see the reasoning). Based on your nitpicks that are either misinformed or flatout wrong, I'd say the only horrible thing in this topic is your advice.
Adding to that, the build you posted isn't endurance efficient, has a 220s recharge on Hasten and a 214s recharge on EE while Hasten is active, lacks tohit and underslots accuracy in attacks (you don't even have enough to hit +3s 95% of the time!), severely underslots Health. -
Quote:I seriously hope this is optional and not mandatory. Last I've used the NCSoft Launcher (~1 year ago, maybe), it was really slow, clunky, buggy and even caused my computer to crash, whereas the CoH updater updates and starts in seconds and never gave me any trouble, ever.
we are currently working to integrate City of Heroes into the NCsoft Launcher -
+0/x8? Any alt. How? Using inspirations as they drop.
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CAK has been buffed recently so I'm guessing they forgot to change the power description to match it.
These descriptions tend to be vague at best and ultimately pointless in many comparisons, best to just take a look at the power real numbers.