OVWyx_EU

Regarding health, "is it worth it with the low hit points?" - yes, I would say so. My level 50s have a fairly feeble 1385 hitpoints or there abouts, and that's with all the accolades, health mid fight may or may not make a difference, it's certainly not noticable, however if you take it away you really really feel it in downtime - worth taking but almost definitely not worth slotting unless, as you said, you really have nothing else to slot. Taking aid self can get round the need for health, but that'll come in to your build fairly late, so considering you give up little to get it, it's well worth the power investment in my opinion.

Regarding enjoying the build, I've got two fire blasters, and they're both a hell of a lot of fun, put it with the right team and you'll cause complete carnage. Burny, burny, goodness.

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Its a lvl 35 CoT mission. Aparently if we go 6+ in the team, we'll need a lvl 50 to complete it as it wall to wall CoT Bosses.

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Nah, that's an exaggeration, you do get a lot of bosses, but it's not completely unmanageable at all. It's not the easiest mission ever I'll admit, and you'll take a few deaths with a poor team, but you definitely don't need a level 50 to complete it. It's the minions that are a pain at that level anyway, quicksand is a complete git if you've got nothing to counter it.

If you want a kinetic for it drop a global tell to @OVWyx, assuming I'm not in the middle of anything I can come give you a hand with mine, she's got the badge already but it's quite a fun mission so I'll happily do it again - mind she's only level 32 though, so may need an SK depending on the level of the mission.

Couple of things. Endurance! You're going to run out. Conserve power is good for post inferno (use it before hand, then afterwards pop a cab and you'll squeeze a few attacks out even with no regen) and to keep you going after EMP. Even with that you may need an end reducer each in the two main AOEs, acrobatics is a fairly end heavy toggle, once you add the epic shield in as well you might find you have issues. Alternately you could just slot more end reducers in attacks of course. AOEs you tend to use with aim or build up most of the time as you get aim and build up more heavily slotted, so the second accuracy isn't really necessary. As to what to ditch if you wanted to take conserve power, I'd actually be tempted to say hasten, although blazing bolt is another possibility, you've got good single target damage in there without it.

If you do take blazing bolt, it has a very high accuracy, added to which you wont drop an even level minion with it unless you're using build up anyway (which gives 62.5% accuracy), so you could actually lose both the accuracies from that.

From a downtime point of view, and bearing in mind you've also taken combat jumping, I'd switch hurdle for health personally.

Also, I could be guessing wrong, but it seems like you've ended up with more slots than you really know what to do with (6 in hasten, 2 end reducers in invis?). While stealth and invis are useful for a blaster to check out the situation before hand, you might want to consider taking medicine instead if you've got slots to burn. Aid self can be a big help on fire for teaming, drop in a recharge, an end reducer, a interrupt duration and three heals and you've something you can use regularly and effectively in fights (I tend to favour stimulant over aid other as the starting power, it's not great, but for emergency use on a held defender it can be handy and it doesn't need slotting, and having a heal tends to lead to you feeling obliged to use it, even when it's not really the most useful thing you could be doing). To be honest either work, but medicine would give you something to do with spare slots.

That'd work well with flame mastery too. Either elec or fire would be fine, fire gives you a hold that's just a smidge better (the slight delay on shocking bolt is noticable when you've used both) although the rest of the pool isn't quite as good. Overall though, it looks like a fairly solid build to me.

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Weren't the devs looking at pretty much all the blaster secondaries with an eye to improving everything except nrg and devices? I confess this is from a fair long while ago - one of those "Yeah we hear you and we might do something. One day."

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Statesman's comment on blaster secondaries seemed to be more based on awareness that some are much better than others, and specifically that fire was pretty substandard. I wouldn’t hold my breath for an overnight rework of that though, it was made a fairly significant amount of time ago, well before I5 certainly. I’d also be a little concerned about nerfs to the better sets, specifically energy, coming with any buffs to the fire set, I am fairly certain the term that was used about the blaster secondaries was "look at", one that tends to send alarm bells ringing all over the place.

I have to say though, that while I find fire manipulation to be poor, Ice manipulation I find exceptionally versatile, with something to offer for both team and solo play. Although the set has some weaker powers I find shiver and ice patch, then later freezing touch, really make up for that. Realistically with the level of control the set gives, you just couldn’t give the mele attacks the same oomph as the elec or energy ones, or it’d be seriously overpowered. The only change that I’d like to see to ice manipulation is the addition of some sort of endurance recovery power. Generally I find it a very enjoyable set to play.

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With 3-slotted stamina and an endredux SO in firebreath and fire ball I never have problems with endurance.

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I have two fire blasters, one with an endurance recovery power in the secondary, and one without, both run the leaping pool which is also slotted for end reduction. I find the difference is actually quite noticable, I guess it depends on how you like to play, but in prolonged fights or when moving from group to group quite quickly, I quite like to have something available to help with endurance because eventually I do run myself out. I also find that having more endurance available will allow me to slot more increase attack rates accross the board, which in turn I find quite useful.

To expand on your second quote:

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solid single target attacks with stun for when things close you

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I was referring to the stun element of the single target attacks. I'd be inclined to agree that stun itself isn't that great.

Was thinking about this the other day again for some reason - probably because we just built a base.

OV has 17 active players currently, of those I'd say about 8 play very regularly (most days for a couple of hours), 5 play fairly regularly (3 or 4 times a week) and the rest are quite casual players.

Regarding prestige earning it's up and down. Our SG has a few teams at varying levels at the moment. Despite having a lot of high level toons in our SG we aren't that wealthy - we lost all our prestige when we transferred from the US - so if we spend a lot of time playing characters around level 35-47, we wont earn that much prestige because a lot of people will be out of SG mode at least part of the time. However when we play our level 50s a lot we really rake it in, the other week I happened to organise a few things at level 50 (pure coincidence of course, nothing to do with us being close to affording a functional base ), a respec, AV evenings, a TF which a good few exemped for, and we made about 500k in a week. That's not normal, the lower level characters don't come close to that, simply because they can't kill the same relative level of mobs with the same speed.

The last thing I want is to turn CoH in to hard work, I never want to get to the stage where we have a base that's a struggle to keep. Our base isn't that huge, but it's got some basic functionality, and it looks cool. That's about as much as I was going for at this stage.

Realisitically I think prestige earning could probably do with tweaking. You don't want a barely active very small SG to be able to have something with all the bells and whistles on inside 3 months, but at the same time a relatively active medium sized SG should be able to get a relatively fuctional medium sized base within a reasonably time frame in my opinion - say 3-6 months. I'd also like to see some more useful functionality in the bases. I wanted a SG base, because I wanted our group to have something that looks cool, but I'd be the first to admit it doesn't really have a massive amount of use barring the odd short cut and shortly some inspiration machines when I get my backside in gear and do the healing badges.

I think some of your slotting could do with a bit of a juggle, although essentially you've got the main powers I'd want to take. Please bear in mind I haven't played these sets together to a high level, I played them both separately.

Knockback protection:

If you're in and out of mele range you really need some. I'd either replace the flight pool with the entire of the leaping pool, or get 3 flight speeds in to hover so that you can use it in combat more effectively. Since ED I edge towards the leaping pool generally on this one, but either can be made to work really.

Attack slotting:

Prior to getting power sink this is going to be a beast of an end hog. You'll probably need to be looking at slotting an end reducer in ice blast, bitter ice blast, charged brawl, havok punch, and thunder strike, although you could easily remove at least some of these once you've got power sink slotted and replace them with recharges.

I favour two accuracies personally, there tends to be a fair amount of debate on this one, if you want to be able to easily fight +3/+4 mobs at higher level, they make it a lot less frustrating.

Aim and Build up.

These provide a massive part of your damage output, 100% damage boost from build up is more than all your enhancements in your attack put together when you have 3 SOs in, 62.5% from aim isn't that bad either. The accuracy boost doesn't go a miss either. Essentially the more you can have them available, the better. I tend to take and slot both aim and build up fairly early. It actually has a larger inpact on damage output accross the board than putting a similar number of slots in attacks.

Holds and slotting them and stuff:

Although they sometimes do reasonably good damage, the damage isn't as good as your other attacks and you've already got a full attack chain. I'd slot any holds available with a combination of accuracy (generally two) hold durations, and recharge. If you're planning to PvP you'd probably want to shuffle that and get more recharge in.

Also, you probably don't need 4
I'd be tempted to take both the ice holds initially, but respec bitter freeze ray out when taking the epic pool. Two ranged holds are more than enough, and if you replace that with a power that doesn't need slotting it'll free up some slots for you. I certainly would never slot bitter freeze ray that heavily, it's a battle opener only really, the animation is very long, you'll probably always use it in conjunction with aim, so just an accuracy and a coulple of hold durations will do, then ditch it later in favour of shocking bolt. In a three hold build (I have one) I 6 slot two of my holds, and have another which I use less often, and usually only to start fights, which I 3 slot (1 acc, 2 hold duration), and I really don't have problems keeping things held. You rarely use all three in a fight, usually only i one of the others misses when you're soloing and you're trying to keep a high level boss held.

Hasten:

I'm really not convinced you'll need it on that build, you've got 6 excellent single target attacks and loads of holds, once you've got power sink you'll be able to slot recharges in attacks, I think you'd probably not miss it massively.

What I would probably recommend for ice/elec is plan a build out that'll function to about 35 or 40, but do it with a respec in mind.

Might have missed something to be honest, was just a quick scan as I have to go and play with my shiny prezzies, hope that makes sense though. Merry Christmas

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Very detailed, but it's flawed from the first sentence because aim and build up don't take Damage enhancements. Only Recharge, End, and ToHit Buffs.

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He means 3 damage SO's in your offensive powers, not in aim and build up.

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She does indeed.

To be honest I had thought my meaning would have been obvious given the context, unfortunately I cannot edit the post for clarity due to the time issue.

It does say that, but it boosts all the secondary effects, apart from the ones it doesn't - some things (eg DOT), don't get boosted by that type of power, I like to know these things

I'm planning on taking the lot as well. The shield should be OK, charged armour would probably be better, but definitely OK from my experience with the blaster version.

Conserve Power should allow me to effectively defend after nuking.

Total focus is total focus, how could you not want that?

Power Build Up just looks good all round, the ability to chuck in a super heal on occasion should be nice, ditto for the end drain.

Anyway, generally getting ahead of myself here, as she's still just a smidge of fulcrum shift at the moment.

*sniggers*

Yeah, the defender ancilliary (there's a word to try and spell in the morning) version is called power build up, and it seems to do lots of shiny things. I was planning on including it for my kin/rad anyway really, but was just curious about the defence debuff thing, should be handy given the build I'm using for her. Cheers for the answer

I think it's been at the brandy to be fair.

Every now and then it just stops, sways, stares off in to space for half a minute, dribbles slightly, then it refocuses and has another go at standing up.

Aim plus build up plus 6 +3 damage SOs in I5 would have taken you to 493% damage or there abouts (that was the figure for the nukes essentially if you 6 slotted damage, based on 100% base, 100% build up, 62.5% aim, and 38.3*6=229.8 from enhancements). With an acc and 5 damage as most people had in their attacks you were looking at ~455%, again, assuming you had +3s in, they made quite a big difference then. Previously even level with 6 SOs gave you 460.5 % damage, with 5 SOs 427.5%, if you used aim and build up before hand. Realistically you could cap yourself on damage for your nukes with just a red or two, depending on the state of your SOs of course.

You don't really get much extra for +3s now, almost nothing extra over +2s, in addition it's only worth slotting 3 damage. 3 slotting on +3 damage the absolute best you can now get is 359.7% (100% base, 100% build up, 62.5 acc and 97.2% enhancements). Technically if you still 6 slotted damage you could squeeze an extra few percent out, but you're definitely not going to top even 400% damage now on your own without the aid of inspirations, you're not getting anywhere near 500% unless you use 6 reds, and personally I tend to carry more break frees, lucks and healths than red - I find I generally need them.

I team with kinetics whenever I can now. I'm too used to seeing those really big numbers, I like them.

Power boost does not buff either the damage buff of aim or build up, or the damage over time element of the fire attacks.

And damn you for having me doing maths before breakfast

Regarding renaming, send a petition in game with two or three name choices in preference order and a brief explanation. Our entire SG moved from Victory to Union about a month back and we lost about a dozen or so names, it was a bit varied, but none of them took more than a couple of days to get renamed after a petition sent, some were done pretty much immediately.

Oh, and if you want to check if a names free, just try to make a new character with it - if you can, you know you can have it, just send the petition.

I find it more enjoyable to do a TF over two evenings generally, most of the ones I organise for our SG are done like that. 3-4 hours is just too much for me in one sitting after a day in work, plus I like to have time to enjoy the story, not ghost missions etc

Whenever we have a space free in a TF I always put it in the union badgehunters channel to see if anyone wants to join us.

Edited to add: When you just click reply to the last person in the thread without actually bothering to read anything other than the first post, then realise you've virtually duplicated the post above you, it makes you look like a plonker. I must remember this in future

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Hangovers really don't help your thought process.

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Tell me about it, works christmas do has a lot to answer for at the moment. What on earth possessed me to glug wine like pop for 4 hours in the afternoon I have no idea.

I'd like to see an inherrant that wasn't at all dependant on the health bar.

Tankers, scrappers and controllers get a bonus essentially for doing what they do best. Manage aggro, hit bosses, control stuff - yay, there's your bonus.

The defender and blaster bonus's just don't work like that, essentially I just don't think they work at all. You get a bonus as a blaster for picking up a load of aggro. Not saying that it's always avoidable, but I'd like a bonus that worked when I'm playing my role well in a team. Staying mostly out of harms way and doing damage.

I actually think the brute inherrant, fury, suits blasters quite well. The figures would need to be tweaked because of our comparatively high base damage, but it could probably be made to work without becoming overpowered. Our damage is generally front loaded enough that it wouldn't always kick in, but in any prolonged fights where our damage obviously isn't sufficient, it'd give us a bit more oooomph. We're fragile enough that it's not massively exploitable - most blasters don't jump from group to group without at least a mini-check out of the situation even when soloing or we'd face plant, certainly not in a team. But say in AV fights as you get nearer the end, or in big missions where you're fighting a lot of higher level mobs, you're damage (and accuracy possibly) would gradually get higher as you go through each group.

I haven't put a massive amount of thought in to it, but off the top of my head, I think I'd like that. Don't think we'll see any changes to defiance though, the biggest victory we got on that one was them changing the name of it from desparation, the devs like it.

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However...the empathy set has the unique ability to make bad teams bareable and good teams ultra killing machines.

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I'd say empathy has the ability to make bad teams bearable and good teams better, but that kinetics turns already really good teams in to ultra killing machines.

But to be fair I agree with Dark Corridor, there's no such thing as a wrong choice when it comes to defender primaries (although I'm yet to be sold on TA). They may have varying degrees of usefulness in different situations, but a good defender is almost always a welcome addition to a team. I think one of the reasons storm gets bad press is that if you do team with a bad one, it's very noticable - sort of like the bad energy blaster everyone once met at some point in a hollows team which coloured their views of them for the next 10 levels, but from my point if view if I'm playing a blaster, a good storm defender is great fun to team with.

Trust me when I say that any team that isn't interested in you purely because you're not an empath almost certainly isn't a team that you really want to play with.

I hesitate to criticise without offering a better alternative, but I think that's another thing that's very low level orientated. I'd love to see inherrants on both blasters and defenders that actually felt like they gave a real benefit to a level 50 player, as well as a level 10 player.

Strangely, I wanted to select more than one option.

It has helped once or twice. Up to about level 10/12 it can actually even be used if you're carrying back up inspirations although I think that's a bad thing in a way - it encourages bad habits in lower level players which will most certainly get you killed later on in the game.

At higher level I just don't fight in the red. The line between full health and no health is just too fine on a blaster, particularly when you're fighting +3/+4 mobs which is fairly likely at higher levels. Sticking about and fighting in the red causes debt. There are many other ways I can get debt without further encouragement. Drinking half a bottle of wine before I log on for example, which seemed like a good idea on saturday night, caused me a certain amount of debt, pratting about with my health bar in order to squeeze out a bit more damage strikes me as an idea that makes that look sensible and well planned :P

Generally, it's pretty useless. Very very very occasionally it kicks in at exactly the right moment and you get a bit more damage/acc and fire off the shot that swings the fight. I can't remember the last time it happened.

I found the description of how it was meant to be used when it was first released (description courtesy of statesman, I really can't find the link to the post unfortunately, limited trolling facilities while in work) very revealing. Essentially his suggestion was that in order to get more damage a blaster may wish to go in to the group first and take the alpha strike, then get the tanker to taunt the bad people off you, while asking any defenders not to heal you of course, in order to take advantage of it.



I cannot believe that anyone who's played a blaster past the hollows could possibly have come up with that brainwave. Bosses take half my hit points on average with a mele attack at level 50, hell, some hit for more hit points than I even have, a +2/+3 rularu brute boss hits for just a little under 2000 points of damage in mele range, a KoA boss hits for about 1300 point of damage in mele range if I remember rightly, a good sneeze off a minion afterwards and you'll fall over.

I know it does me no real harm because I don't use it, I think I'm slightly offended that someone might think I'm stupid enough to do that though.

If I wish to hit the damage cap, I'll team with a kinetic thank you very much.

They don't have this on these forums, so I've imported it just for you.

Thwack

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Best invention EVER Teamspeak.

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That's certainly true, I just cannot imagine trying to play an online game without it. It kind of surprises me how few people in CoH use it, I'm used to games where almost everyone uses some sort of voice coms system.

Regarding use of status protection buffs, I tend to go for other defenders first. I have two defenders, one emp and one kin, I have to admit the kinetic is the one I really love playing. In large teams I don't attempt to keep clear mind on everyone in most circumstances. I certainly don't attempt it with Increase Density. I'll wack it on when there's nothing else to do, and generally stick it on every one who needs it between groups, but kinetics in particular is a very busy set to play, it's not practical to get obsessive about keeping ID on all squishies if you've got more than 2 or 3 in my experience. The only real exception to that is when fighting malta and carnies, when I will keep status protection buffs coming thick and fast and make sure I keep it on the tanker, despite the amusement of seeing someone held for the first time in 30 levels.

Generally though, if people get held, I'll sort it. ID goes on with speed boost so people only get it half the time, if someone gets stunned/held etc then I'll reapply, clear mind goes on all squishies while moving from group to group, again, reapplied if needed. Both my defenders fly while fighting, I find the arial view helps me keep track of what's going on and who needs what when, also helps me anticipate a little. I do expect good players to be carrying a couple of break frees as well though, in case of a real emergency. I certainly wouldn't leave home without at least that in one of my blasters or defenders, no matter how much status protection was available in the team.

Fire/Energy would certainly work a lot better. Devastating AOEs from the primary, boost range helps blaze and fire breath, and conserve power's a big plus with the endurance hungry AOEs, and solid single target attacks with stun for when things close you. I think energy/fire is probably one of the more "interesting" combinations. Fire manipulation isn't a great set in a lot of ways, combining it with a knockback primary would render it pretty near useless, you'd be scattering things out of your own AOEs.

On my fire/fire I have ring of fire, fire sword, build up, fire sword circle and consume which is certainly more than a lot of people take, the damage from FS and FSC is good, but the animation on FSC is long, with extra added rooting at the end for good measure. Consume I find excellent, once slotted you can regain full endurance from just a couple of bad guys and it's only got a 1 endurance activation cost. The thing with fire manipulation though is that in order to get good use out of it you ideally want to be playing regularly with a good tanker, however given a choice a lot of tankers will give energy blasters a fairly wide berth.

Can anyone tell me if power build up from the Power Mastery pool will boost the defence debuff of my radiation blasts?

Cheers,

Wyx

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I had X-ray eyes on Gamma in Beta

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It's bizarre how many times I had to read that sentence for it to make sense to me

I think this may be considered a heretical opinion about these parts, but *mumble* I can't stand the animation on x-ray beam *mumble* so I never took it earlier on.

I wasn't sold on the animation length v damage either, but then I only seriously considered it at a comparatively high level by which point I had cosmic burst anyway (now that is a cool looking power) to pair up with neutrino bolt - as I'm kinetic I don't need to worry about little things like recharge, or getting close to stuff, I'm there or there abouts anyway