Obitus

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  1. Obitus

    DoT and Procs

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EnigmaBlack View Post
    Yes I understand that. Since you ask if I care, I guess I don't because I also understand sometimes you get powers that are just better than others. Them be the breaks.

    That is my opinion. Your entitled to yours. You just don't have to be a condescending jerk when making yours.
    You would have received less condescension if you'd responded to what was written, rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and exclaiming (yet again) that "some people" just don't like fun, or being powerful.

    Near as I can tell, the only thing that some people object to is the idea that Rain powers are suddenly the alpha and omega of offense in the game. You're entitled to think that somehow your selecting a rain-equipped power set should give you a ridiculously large advantage, but you haven't even tried to justify that view with reasoned argument.

    Saying simply that some powers are better than others is a cop out, once again ignoring the sheer extent of the advantage in question, which several people in this thread have gone to some trouble to describe, and which you've gone to absolutely no trouble to wave away. We even have an example within the very same Incarnate system to look to for a dev-approved standard of AoE damage -- Judgement, which by your own logic delivers less damage than rain-delivered Reactive -- and yet you continue to spew meaningless platitudes, "Some people are just such miserable nerf advocates!"

    Your right to express an opinion guarantees the right of others to criticize your opinion. Flippancy and distortion deserve to be met with condescension.
  2. Obitus

    DoT and Procs

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    The fact that the DoT doesn't seem to have the same stacking limiter as all other Reactive effects is actually almost certainly broken. It is the stacking limiter that moderates what the Reactive power can do, regardless of how fast or slow you use it. Somehow the DoT escaped that limit.
    Do you have any info to suggest that the stacking limit is bypassed by Rain powers? I'm honestly curious, because that was my first thought when I heard how powerful Reactive Rains were -- but then I figured the DoT is just that powerful, assuming you can keep it fully saturated full-time.

    In other words, I think that the Reactive DoT was designed not to be fully stackable by a solo player as a matter of course. The fact that each DoT tick has a 20% to fail tends to prop up that assumption; in rains, that chance of the DoT's premature ending is functionally irrelevant because the proc itself is checked so often that it's going to refresh almost immediately regardless.

    Just going by very rough numbers, fully stacked Reactive delivers ~13 damage * 6 DoTs * 8 ticks = 624 damage. That's pretty crazy, until you realize that your chance of seeing any individual DoT last its full duration is something like 0.8 ^ 7 = 20.9%, and that's assuming you roll successfully on the initial 75% chance to proc.

    So TL;DR, I'm not sure the stack limit has to be broken for Reactive Rains to break balance. If the stack limit is broken, then that's even more troubling.
  3. Obitus

    DoT and Procs

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EnigmaBlack View Post
    No I'm hung up on the fact that Incarnate powers are SUPPOSED to make your characters more powerful, now that they are, there seems to be a problem with it for some players. Yet if the Reactive set was as subpar as the others, I suspect the argument from players would be that they don't feel "super" enough
    Extraordinarily unresponsive. The Reactive Interface proc arbitrarily makes characters with Rain powers massively more powerful than others. Do you understand that? Do you care? We don't know, because you refuse to respond on that point; instead, you prefer to prop up and then knock down the alleged position of some nameless "others."

    Quote:
    Noooo my argument is that the stacking -res is what makes Sleet "over powered" compared to RoF or Ice Storm
    30% is the amount of the -RES, dude. Once again, unresponsive.

    Enjoy conversing with yourself.
  4. Obitus

    DoT and Procs

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EnigmaBlack View Post
    Sleet also has it's own inherent -Res which stacks with the Interface proc. RoF and Ice Storm do not.

    So let's say Sleet is over powered for with the proc, if it's adjusted then what becomes of RoF and Ice Storm? Also, mobs differ, so if someone can kill an entire +4 Cimeroa mob with Sleet can they do the same with an entire +4 Praetorian mob?

    As said earlier, Incarnate powers are supposed to make your character more powerful than before. Now that they are powerful, there seems to be a problem for some.
    Sleet delivers 24.75 base damage and a 30% RES debuff. Almost no one bothers to slot it for damage, but for the sake of argument, let's say it is slotted for damage: 24.75 * 1.95 = 48.3 damage from the power itself.

    Rain of Fire delivers 126.25 base damage. Slotted to the ED cap for damage, it goes up to 126.25 * 1.95 = 246.2 damage from the power itself.

    Ice Storm delivers 117 base damage. Slotted to the ED cap, it goes up to 117 * 1.95 = 228.2 damage from the power itself.

    Your argument, in effect, is that 30% of the Rain-delivered Reactive DoT, alone, is significantly more valuable than what is, at best, a ~180 damage disadvantage for Sleet.

    That in itself is an indictment of the way these powers work with Reactive. You're conceding that Reactive delivers well more than 600 damage on its own (180 / 0.3 = 600). Do you honestly believe that an Incarnate ability designed to add a DoT effect to all of your attacks is supposed to deliver 600+ damage over that short a period to so many targets?

    Keep in mind that Judgement nukes weigh in at around 430 damage. Also keep in mind that Rains can be available anywhere from 3 to 5 times more often than Judgement.

    Again, the problem isn't that Reactive makes characters more powerful. The problem is that it makes some builds vastly more powerful than it does others, and for no good reason. Hell, if there were some other way to guarantee full-time saturation of the Reactive DoT effect, Rains would be superfluous -- perhaps even more superfluous than other attacks, because they take time to deliver their damage. Would that be okay with you, or are you just hung up on the fact that your character (to use your phrase) has a Rain power?
  5. It's impractical to sift through the dreck without at least some vague assurance that someone, somewhere vetted the product first. Like it or not, people who have made it their profession to know what will be popular have an enhanced credibility.

    See also: CoH's Mission Architect.

    Some very good, independent products can, of course, shine through and succeed by word of mouth. Some very bad products can, of course, survive the corporate vetting process. There are no hard-and-fast rules.

    Still, I think what you see as an oppressive corporate influence on art is less objectionable in the grand scheme than the Twitter-enflamed presumption that everyone is a special snowflake entitled to an audience. Also, I'd be shocked to find that independent artists generally make anywhere near as much money as corporation-endorsed artists do. (Edit: I don't scoff at the self-published, but I have a hard time caring about them -- or even knowing they exist. As Terra points out, professional marketing is worth something.)
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tenzhi View Post
    The people who *don't* want spoilers... I'm calling the people who insist that everything must be shiny and new (i.e. spoiler-free) to be enjoyable "ADD-headed buffoons". I can only imagine they flit frantically from new thing to new thing, desperately seeking out the next exciting surprise to use up and then toss aside like some hateful reminder of what it's like to actually enjoy something because it's good rather than because it was unknown, before inevitably running out of new things and dieing in a spectacular flash of boredom.
    There's a lot of middle ground between wanting to see a film with fresh eyes and being so freakishly obsessed with freshness that you can't concentrate on any one thing for longer than the average gnat. It's easy to lampoon the extreme, but it's equally easy to lampoon its opposite. For instance, world-weary cynicism is just as annoying in large doses as the instant-gratification mindset that is widely presumed to have overtaken western society. Examples of both are so widely available these days, particularly on the internet, that it isn't difficult to work yourself up into a froth about a perceived trend towards either.

    Personally, I'd just as soon avoid having my perception of a work of fiction skewed before the fact, whether that skewing comes in the form of a plot revelation or in the form of the all-too-pervasive know-it-all deconsructionism that seems to have proliferated in the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube age. I don't think I'm being unreasonable or dimwitted for feeling that way.

    None of the above means that I won't occasionally read a review about a movie I haven't seen, or that I won't occasionally take pleasure in wantonly wading through plot spoilers. It doesn't mean that I'm incapable of enjoying a movie the end to which I already know. It does mean that sometimes there is a purity in freshness, a sense of wonder that can only come from inexperience with the material and a blindness to the tropes to which the material might fall victim. We can sometimes enjoy that initial sense of wonder even by recollection, even in subsequent viewings of a given film -- but not if we never felt it in the first place.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Father Xmas View Post
    [A]nd since I didn't want to get tossed out of the theater before Thor, I didn't beat those facts into him with my meaty fists of justice but God I wanted to oh so badly.
    You better watch out, cuz Santa Claus is comin to town!
  8. Obitus

    DoT and Procs

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by FrostyG View Post
    You are woefully mistaken. You'd be casting sleet anyway, reactive actually turns it into one of (if not) the best dpa attack in your arsenal. Sleet casts in 2.25 seconds and can take out a +2 lut. It is astounding from a dpa, dpe, and dps standpoint.
    Just to add a (belated) data point, fitting Rain of Fire into my Dominator's single-target rotation added ~60 DPS to my non-Lore Pylon run. The only difference between the two runs was the Rain; in both cases I had T4 Reactive.

    The problem here isn't Reactive or Rain powers. The problem is the interaction between them. People can reasonably argue one way or the other about the balance of various Interface powers, or about the balance of Reactive on its own, but those issues frankly border on irrelevance.

    One can also reasonably argue that because Reactive DoTs don't stack beyond a certain point (IIRC 6), Reactive Rains are only overpowered in a solo context. And what does that really matter? After all, fully tricked out, I-20 Incarnates are already very powerful in generic content.

    But not that powerful. My experience on a Mind Dominator -- not a character particularly well-suited to leverage rains, by the way -- shows that Reactive Interface basically turns any Rain power into a ranged, crashless Inferno available on an every-spawn basis.

    Reactive Rains are too strong, not because the NPC opponents will object; not even because team Incarnate content will be trivialized. They're too strong because they give an absolutely astronomical and entirely arbitrary advantage to any old build with access to a Rain power. They make a mockery of almost every offensive build decision in a game the appeal of which, to many players, comes down to the rich complexity of crafting builds.

    If you (you used generically) genuinely enjoy Reactive Rains in their present state, I can't tell you you're wrong. All I can tell you is that the mere existence of this quirk in the game mechanics has overwhelmed me with ambivalence about the game. I was gonna run my Tanker through the trials after I finished my Dom, but oh wait, why bother if he doesn't have a Rain power? Maybe I should run my Storm Controller instead -- but do I really want to spoil what is inherently a low-offense character by reveling in an anomaly that is almost guaranteed to be fixed?

    Engaging games require meaningful choices. Meaningful choices require some measure of balance. One overwhelmingly powerful option is no option at all.
  9. Obitus

    Mind/Fire Build

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by EmmaGrace View Post
    Can someone please make a really good build for a Mind/Fire dominator? I'm terrible at it.. NOT, a PvP build. Something for TFs.

    Thanks! (:
    I don't mean to pick on you Emma, but there's a reason that posts like yours often don't receive helpful replies: they don't provide enough information. They don't even indicate that the poster is interested enough in the subject to appreciate any advice s/he might receive.

    If all you want is a generic build template, I'm sure you could find many of those in a forum search. If what you want is a build that is tailored to your taste and play style, then there are people who are willing to help, but you're going to have to give them more to work with than, "Something for TFs."

    Are there, for instance, any powers that you just can't live without? What kind of travel do you prefer? How much influence are you willing to spend? Do you often exemplar? If so, then down to what level? Do you even have Mids' Hero Designer, and know how to use it?

    Refining a build for an individual player is an often difficult and thankless task; trying to refine a build for an individual who won't even try to tell you her preferences is almost impossible.
  10. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Yomo_Kimyata View Post
    Exactly. I went home just before I19.
    Heh, me too, give or take a few weeks. Just don't have any compelling reason to make money these days.

    At the height of my marketeering interest, I was up to about 5 characters -- 1 designated buyer/crafter, and 3/4 sellers. Very occasionally I'd go up as high as 7 characters, but that wasn't a conscious decision to expand; it was the result of my misjudging how fast my stock would move.

    The stock always moved eventually, though. YMMV.
  11. Super Speed is just on for the stealth. Its movement modifier doesn't affect flight speed.

    For comparison's sake, if I turned off Hover in that video and ran around with SS, I'd be moving roughly twice as fast (~80 MPH versus fast enough for most people's purposes -- faster than base Sprint speed by a healthy margin, in my case.

    And thanks
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sandrock View Post
    New to blasters and I was curious about hoverblasting. Can any powerset hoverblast or Whichpowersets are more tailored to it? I remember one of the secondaries have a boost range. Would that be a mandatory thing? And it would make sense to shoot for just ranged def from IOs.

    Just curious because I think this would be a fun project as I play and only have 50s as a tank brute scrap and mm
    Best two secondaries for Hover blasting are */Energy and */Fire, in my opinion -- Energy because it gives you Boost Range on a permanent basis, Fire because it gives you the best ranged attack power available in any Blaster Secondary (Ring of Fire).

    Best Primary is a crapshoot. If all you care about is maximizing range, then Psy and Archery are probably best because they don't have a short-range tier 3 single-target attack (IIRC). Special mention goes to Ice Blast, whose tier 3 attack is 50' (again, IIRC). Electric doesn't have a tier 3 either, but I'd hesitate to recommend that set in any context.

    If what you want is the best combination of single-target and AoE damage, then you're looking for Fire Blast, but really you can't go wrong; even with the occasional short-ranged attack, you can hover blast just fine. Fully enhanced Hover maneuvers quite well. Worse comes to worst, you can always slot some range enhancement (Centriole exposures are a big help here). Cardiac Alpha also gives a tasty across-the-board range enhancement buff.

    If you're curious to see how Hover performs in an always-on context, here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOYiJVss6OQ
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by flipside View Post
    Thank you for sharing your build. Unfortunately I'm very stuck on wanting Ice Mastery for the epic for synergy. There are also a couple power picks in there that I don't plan on taking again, such as Hurricane. I spent a long time with Hurricane but I don't believe my current play style works well with it.
    Cheaper version of my Ice Mastery build in the previous post, this time without Hurricane. Also kept Jack Frost because I figure you probably don't share my hangups with the power. No Frost Breath this time, though, unfortunately. I'm sure there's a way to cram it in there if you really want it.

    (Problem is that you start to run into the cap for 6.25% recharge bonuses the more AoEs you toss into the mix. This is one of those rare situations where Purple sets really do give you more benefit than their incrementally improved numbers might superficially indicate.)

    44.9% Ranged, ~32% Smash/Lethal, 19.9+% all other DEF. +83.8% global recharge, +28.5% global damage. Only one purple IO (the Unbreakable Constraint proc), no PvP IOs:

    Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
    http://www.cohplanner.com/
    Click this DataLink to open the build!
    Code:
    | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
    |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
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    Edit: Here's a version of the above with Frost Breath wedged in. 45.1% Ranged, ~33% Smash/Lethal DEF, 98.8% global recharge, +24% global damage:

    Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
    http://www.cohplanner.com/
    Click this DataLink to open the build!
    Code:
    | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
    |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
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  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Obitus View Post
    Second, an Ice Mastery build designed to go with Cardiac/Clarion. This one has a more traditional (for lack of a better term) flavor to it, both in form and function -- a fully fleshed out single-target attack chain (though it's worth noting that Mids' numbers for the APP attacks are over-inflated), and two bona-fide AoE attacks (Frost Breath and Ice Storm). It should play pretty well solo or teamed with or without the current Reactive Interface mechanics.
    A variant on the Ice Mastery build, this time with soft-capped Smash/Lethal DEF as well as soft-capped Ranged DEF. +98.8% global recharge, +29.5% global damage:

    Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
    http://www.cohplanner.com/
    Click this DataLink to open the build!
    Code:
    | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
    |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
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  15. You know, it's funny: I've had a few builds I've been kicking around for my Ice/Storm's I-20 incarnation (no pun intended) for ages now -- but now that I sit down and think about them, I'm struck by indecision. Even more indecision than usual, I mean.

    For instance, do I even want to keep Jack Frost? He's annoyed me endlessly for years now, and his AI these days seems to be at about its lowest point. Frankly, the best argument I can conceive to keep him has more to do with his stacking slow aura against AVs than it does with the pet itself. That's pretty sad. Sadder still when you consider Jack's odds of surviving in melee range with an AV for any meaningful length of time.

    Then there's the whole issue of AoE damage. As things stand now, frankly, Reactive Interface + Freezing Rain is probably all the AoE you'd ever want or need on an Ice/Storm character. And the devs have said (apparently) that pseudo pets' interaction with Interface procs is working as intended -- but is that assurance truly worth building around?

    So anyway, a couple of builds with which i'm not really all that happy, but they serve as decent examples of the two different approaches I mentioned earlier.

    First, a PSI Mastery build designed to go with Musculature, Spiritual, or Cardiac and combined with Ageless Destiny. Really any of them should work; the idea is that you get your end management from Ageless and your Mez protection from Indomitable Will, which is very nearly perma when Ageless is thrown into the mix.

    44.9% Ranged DEF, 47.2% Psi DEF (with IW active), 20+% to all other types/positions. +30% global damage, +98.8% global recharge (before Hasten or Ageless). On this build I did take Jack, though I'm not thrilled about it; I thought about swapping Jack for Mental Blast (Thunderstrike having the same +ranged DEF bonus as Blood Mandate), but I don't love the way the psionic attacks look; PSI Mastery is really only there for the status protection.

    Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
    http://www.cohplanner.com/
    Click this DataLink to open the build!
    Code:
    | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build |
    |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
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    Second, an Ice Mastery build designed to go with Cardiac/Clarion. This one has a more traditional (for lack of a better term) flavor to it, both in form and function -- a fully fleshed out single-target attack chain (though it's worth noting that Mids' numbers for the APP attacks are over-inflated), and two bona-fide AoE attacks (Frost Breath and Ice Storm). It should play pretty well solo or teamed with or without the current Reactive Interface mechanics.

    44.9% Ranged DEF, 37% Smash/Lethal DEF, 20+% to all others. +30% global damage, +106.3% global recharge (before Hasten).

    Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.94
    http://www.cohplanner.com/
    Click this DataLink to open the build!
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  16. I tend to think that non-Kin Controllers are among the builds for which Musculature is actually most useful. With Containment, you have a very nearly a Blaster's (virtual) base AT damage scalar (0.55*2 = 1.1 versus 1.125) -- but unlike Blasters, you don't have regular access to high-order damage buffs (Aim, Build Up, Defiance).

    So Musculature will provide a larger proportional benefit to a non-Kin Controller than it will to most anyone else.

    In Ice/Storm/Ice's case, Musculature will provide a significant boost in the damage of Frostbite, Chilblain, Block of Ice, Ice Blast, Frost Breath, Ice Storm, Freezing Rain, Jack Frost, Lightning Storm, and Tornado. That boost to base damage will be further augmented by the -RES debuff in Freezing Rain. Though it's certainly true that lower damage powers will receive a smaller bonus in absolute terms, it all adds up. Musculature also boosts Judgement and Lore powers; of all the alpha slots, in fact, Spiritual is explicitly designed to provide the least benefit to other Incarnate powers.

    None of the above necessarily means that Musculature is right for you; I just thought I'd throw it out there. Prior to I-20, I would have said categorically that Cardiac is the way to go; Ice/Storm is such an obscene endurance hog that there's little choice in the matter, almost no matter what you do with IO bonuses. Nowadays, you've a little more leeway.

    The approaches I'm considering for my own Ice/Storm are as follows:
    1. Musculature Alpha (likely Radial for the incidental +recovery, but possibly Core if I feel I can get away with it) with Ageless Destiny. Ageless obviously locks me out of Clarion Destiny's mez protection, so if I were to go this route I'd probably stick with Psi Mastery for Indomitable Will. You can certainly function without mez protection on an Ice/Storm, but Arctic Air really shines when it can't be easily detoggled.
    2. Cardiac Alpha (Core all the way) with Clarion Destiny. Probably the most obvious set up. The addition of Clarion would give me a guilt-free choice of APP/Patron pool. I'd probably take Ice Mastery here.

    As far as IO bonuses go, I'm a big fan of DEF bonuses. Recharge and recovery are given of course, as are procs where you can fit them. I'll try to remember to post some sample builds later.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master View Post
    ageless destiny works like popping a blue insp with some side effects

    you can use the ageless destiny with 0 current end and the tier 4 refills your bar completely
    Yes. There's no way to avoid the initial 100% end drain, which may or may not be a big deal to you depending on how much you rely on toggle powers. Also, even the highest +recovery buff from Ageless (+800%, if my numbers are correct) is still lower than the -1000% recovery debuff from the crash.

    So "crashless" is a misnomer. Ageless will certainly help to mitigate the nuke crash, but it won't eliminate the crash altogether. All in all, I'd say the so-called crashless nuke thing is a bad reason to choose Ageless Destiny. If you have other compelling reasons to take Ageless, then sure, go nuts -- but if not, don't lose sleep over Ageless' effect on the nuke crash.
  18. Obitus

    Tough hide..?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by UberRod View Post
    I can agree that Energy Mastery is sub-optimal except for endurance management and the +regen. However I tend to take Energy Mastery a lot for my toons and like LBE over Hurl. Granted if I wanted better attacks I would go elsewhere.

    I believe it is like this: Hurl < LBE < other attacks. I'd still go with LBE, sub-optimal as it is over Hurl. And anything is better than Hand Clap.

    The point of the thread is to convince the OP to take Tough Hide and to drop Hand Clap and Hurl.
    Fair enough. The only reason I even brought it up was that I don't think Hurl or LBE is such a mismatched choice that it deserves so much hand wringing -- a premise that seems ironic in retrospect because my stating it spawned even more semi-off-topic talk.

    If your choice is between LBE and Hurl, you're essentially making a conceptual decision, is all. I'd personally tend to agree with you that LBE is better than Hurl, but if someone truly does want an option to ground the occasional flyer and/or just adores the aesthetics of Hurl, then I can't tell them they're wrong -- just as I would never criticize someone for taking LBE to flesh out their Superman-esque character concept.

    It all comes down to the build's attack chain. If you're looking to incorporate a ranged attack into your regular attack chain, then LBE is clearly better because it takes up less time and accepts the Achilles' Heel proc. If you already have a continuous ST attack chain and you just want the ranged attack as a mule and for the occasional distant enemy, then it's a toss up: Hurl delivers a larger burst of damage (~63% more than LBE), so it's more likely to kill a wounded runner in one shot, for example. Hurl has a Fly debuff that can potentially make an annoying encounter with a flying opponent much faster.

    (It's worth noting that neither LBE nor Hurl is as good as Punch for a continuous ST attack chain. Partly thanks to Bruising -- which essentially forces Tankers to slot and use their fast-recharge Tier 1 attacks -- Tankers generally have a pretty easy time constructing a seamless attack chain without resorting to APP/Patron powers. So if I had to make up a rule of thumb, it would be that you take LBE if you're trying to fit in a ranged-attack mule and your build is so tight that you had to skip Punch as a result. Edit: All of the above assumes you're taking Energy Mastery to begin with, just to be crystal clear.)

    To make an over-long story short: Hand Clap is a much bigger problem here, if you can even call it that, than Hurl/LBE.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by tanstaafl View Post
    Will the Enhance Damage Resistance part of Ribosome Exposures work to grant more resist debuff in Sleet?

    Seems to me it would be for great slotting in there, far better than the achilles proc.

    thanks
    Sleet's resistance debuff is flagged to ignore enhancements and buffs. So no, the Ribosome shouldn't enhance the RES debuff; I don't know of any way to enhance any RES debuff.

    On the other hand, there's a possibility that a Ribosome would boost the power's damage, because RES and damage are coded (IIRC) as merely different aspects of the same attribute. That's why damage debuffs work better against critters that don't have resistance to their own damage type.
  20. Obitus

    Tough hide..?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DoctorWhat View Post
    Note that I never said anything about Energy Torrent, only LBE. And I still stand by my statement of it being solid. Not excellent, not outstanding, just solid. Does every other ST attack in the APPs out do it? Why yes they do. That doesn't mean it isn't a good attack, it's just a solid attack surrounded by better offensive options.
    Hey, different strokes, man. Almost by definition, I'd say that the worst of a given set of analogous options can't be called solid, but this whole solid-not-solid thing is semantics. (Disclaimer: I'm not even sure offhand that LBE is the worst available ST attack in the APPs/Patrons, but I do know that it's markedly worse than at least four other popular options -- Gloom, Fire Blast, Mu Lightning, Ice Blast. I'd imagine the Mace option is worse than LBE by dint of redraw penalties, but I'll have to look it up later.)

    The rest is just confusion, it seems: First I say that Energy Mastery (the whole pool, including Torrent) is a "terrible" source of supplemental attack powers. Then you reply to say that LBE "isn't terrible." Then I say that I was talking about the combination of LBE and Torrent. Now you say that you weren't talking about Torrent. We're talking past each other here, and over something that's pretty silly even on a forum the purpose of which is inherently insignificant.

    Thus far, I've gotten a lot of vaguely snippy correction over an issue my over-arching theory of which no one has even explicitly questioned. Do you disagree that Energy Mastery is a sub-optimal choice for anything but endurance management and incidental +regen? Do you disagree with the idea that people looking for bona-fide attack powers should go elsewhere? Doesn't seem like you do.
  21. The trials are designed to exploit builds' weaknesses, but also to emphasize their strengths. Passive mitigation (DEF/RES) is very heavily penalized by the turrets in BAF, the ridiculous self buffs of the 9CUS, and potentially by the overlapping buffs from Battle Orbs in Lambda (along with a preponderance of psi damage and the hilarious annoyance of PBAoE Drain Psyche flying all over the place). Also, the blue patches o' doom in Apex.

    Control is favored heavily against the 9CUs and against just about everything in Lambda. It's penalized against the AVs and the escapees. By the same token, aggro control is penalized against the BAF AVs, and invalidated against the BAF escapees.

    That's just the way the trials roll, and frankly I think it's a good thing. Mind Control is arguably the most heavily penalized control set in the escapee phase, for instance (you can harp on Mass Hypnosis all you want, but in a phase where your league is trying to kill everything as fast as possible, a sleep ain't exactly the most useful thing in the world) -- but it's also perhaps uniquely well-suited for the sabotage phase of Lambda. (Aggro-less control FTW.) Confusion is useless against the escapees, but hilarious against 9CUs or Battle Orbs.

    Fear also works quite well, perhaps unusually well, in Lambda (because during the sabotage phase you're probably not going to be attacking the feared targets to allow them to retaliate).

    I don't think the complaint in the OP is unreasonable or unreasoned. I do believe that it's unwarranted, though. Just about every character build has reason to complain that this-or-that segment of the trials marginalizes their schtick, whatever that schtick may be. The fact that the OP's complaint happens to center around what is probably the most infamously overpowered powerset combination in the entire game is fuel for the fire, but ultimately irrelevant.

    (Whether Ill/Rad is overpowered in any meaningful way is another question; personally I don't think the ability to solo AVs is as important as it's often made out to be on the forums. And though Phantom Army is flat-out uber in certain situations, it's also far less efficient than a hard AoE control in most generic content. YMMV.)
  22. Obitus

    Thundergod

    Off-topic:

    What'd you give Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins, Yomo?
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Madadh View Post
    Not that I'm supporting him, just supporting truth and fairness in advertising; I think his quote was taken from before Issue 20, so..... And, if anyone does think that truth is absolute, and therefore that it must be true or false for all time, then even then, this statement was prefaced with, "As things now stand," so.....
    Tankers could solo AVs well before I-20. The issue with je saist isn't that he's always wrong; it's that he pronounces sometimes hilariously inaccurate things with an air of absolute and unassailable certainty.

    Take the quote in question. He was responding to a thread in which people were talking about soloing AVs (not GMs, an important distinction), and his position was not only that it is implausible for Tankers to solo AVs; rather, his position was that a Tanker soloing an AV is such an outrageously implausible feat that it constitutes a borderline exploit, a game-breaking loophole so large that it would require immediate and emergency action by the development team:

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by je_saist View Post
    As it stands right now, any tank that soloed an AV/Hero class opponent without temporary powers would have Castle, Synapse, AND Sunstorm all agreeing to implement a nerf on the very next patch.

    One of the factors you have to consider is that very few scrapper / brute builds can generate to required DPS to over-come an AV/Hero class's regeneration rate. A tank, by default, even using the same exact slotting as a scrapper, is going to be down on damage by 30%.
  24. Obitus

    Tough hide..?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by DoctorWhat View Post
    While LBE isn't the greatest attack in the APPs it is solid, and takes the -res proc. Against AVs and GMs spamming it will get the proc off sooner or later and coupled with Bruising will give you and your team extra damage.

    Is it the best attack in the APP? No, hardly. Is it terrible? Hardly, less so if you know what to do with it.
    LBE is not solid. It's mediocre. LBE is not terrible, though, and I never said it was; I said that the Energy Mastery pool is terrible for supplementary attack powers, and I stand by that statement. Slotting Achilles' Heel in LBE and using it as a ghetto debuff (a debuff that doesn't stack, by the way -- and is likely to be covered by at least one other source in a full, high-end team) doesn't suddenly make Energy Torrent a competitive AoE power.

    The point is that Energy Mastery has a different purpose, mostly endurance management. I explicitly disclaimed that that is an appropriate design decision. It's frankly mystifying that any of this is so very controversial, even to the point where people like Hyperstrike -- whose posts I normally admire -- will go to the trouble first to give me an unsolicited and ambiguous correction, and then, when I respond to clarify, answers with the following gem:

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hyperstrike View Post
    Never mind. I have better things to do than wrangle over something this insignificant.
    I sure am grateful you took time out of your busy schedule to remind me how important you are, dude. Especially given that you started the quibbling.
  25. Obitus

    Tablet Support?

    If I could play CoH (or hell, even just use the character-creation/chat/market UI) on a device that's smaller than a legal pad, that would spell the end of what passes for productivity in my life these days.

    So in this case, bad news is good news.

    It's been an interesting thread, though.