Oedipus_Tex

I've never played a Stalker before, and never really intended to, but I happened to end up on during double XP weekend and so it kind of happened...

Anyway, I have a Spines/Ice Armor. He seems pretty good but I have a question about Assassin's Focus is supposed to work. I see from reading about it that 3 stacks should cause Assassin Strike to have a 100% chance for critical. However, I can't figure out what makes it stack. I assume its just hitting the enemy; however, more often than not, the orange ring around Assassin's Focus will appear halfway through an attack animation, then disappear before the animation finishes. That would seem to imply I'm close to 3 stacks, but hitting the enemy two or three more times in a row doest make it come back reliably. Is this just because the Spines animations are so long that the stack falls off before I can animate through a chain? Is it supposed to do that? Any advice is helpful.

Level shifts were broken in incarnate trials and are more broken in teams of 2-8. The zone feels like fighting level 47s in Peregrine Island and in practice that's exactly what it is. But you've heard that from me already, so that's all.

BTW I didn't read all of the rest of the thread, but one thing CoX generally does not do that is rampant in the industry is place a team quest at the end of a chain of solo quests. The sister method of this is having a quest that provides a special reward within a dungeon only if you've completed a different chain before starting the dungeon.

That means two things: solo players are annoyed because they need to team to do the quest, and people who want to mostly team are annoyed because they wasting their time unless they are perfectly aligned with another player or else solo up to the point that it's worth the quest.

In fairness, I did sort of like the fact that everyone's hands weren't on fire all the time and I got to occasionally see people's outfits underneath the buffs. I spend the great majority of my time in CoH translucent.

I also really wish cut scenes would take a tack from far away and include our own teams in them. Part of the reason the cut scenes fall flat for me is they look the same every time and seem to have very little to do with the force that is there to assault the AV.

EDIT: But I don't need a Voice Over cutscene with game-impacting decisions every time I run an errand for an old lady that's lost her cat.

I've tried both and much preferred Psi to Ice generally for Ice Control on Controllers. However for defense I shoot for Ranged over everything else. This creates some possible issues if enemies get directly on top of you, but Frostbite stops them from running at you. It does mean 12 seconds of them not falling, so you want the defense to anchor you during that time.

If you still have Endurance issues, you can take Destiny Ageless to fix them. This has the side effect of making your mezz protection come back faster. If you don't have Endurance issues, you can take Barrier if you want. Barrier works really well for Ice since it frequently has so many enemies right in its face.

Yep sorry. Was a first draft that never got revised. Kept meaning to get back to it but never did, and it was never officially released. There are some very wrong statements in there that I would have probably caught in editing. Hazard of how it was written (mostly stream of consciousness style one Saturday morning, type type type type ).

You can plagariaze from my old start of a guide if you want: http://pastehtml.com/view/b7pokm6ab.html

I don't agree with all of my own advice and remember this was beginners, without digging into hard-core ramifications of a tricked out set. But it may provide some baseline philosophy of approach and/or specific slotting options (note: some have typos I never corrected; I tend to type Recharge when I mean Endurance for example).

Ok, more info: if you create a new character and do the tutorial, selecting Hero, when you complete it you get the CantFindMap(0) warning. However, you warp to Atlas Park anyway.

Update: Took a character to the Tram station on a hunch. On attempting to change zones, the screen darkens, but the character re-appears in Atlas Park "inside" the train track with a popup message reading: CantFindMap(10).

Edit again: Trying to walk to Steel Canyon physically produces CantFindMap(6). I should have clicked a few more maps at thetram, I guess the number varies with the map.

Zill--I did some limited testing and it appears new characters can get into the game. Existing characters cannot. I only tested 2 servers, but I got the "map" error only on exisiting toons. On Exalted, specifically, existing characters would bekicked but new tooncould get in. The new toon could also log in and out without issues. Hope that helps.

Rain of Fire, actually.

[Though the moment that kills me (literally) is in TPN with an Ice Dom with enemies bouncing all over on Ice Slick and Sleet all around me and some Earth Controller starts spamming immobilizes and nothing else from range! I swear some people are really just out to kill their teammates.]

I have long held that one of the bigger disappointments in the game is that Corruptors were created as Blast/Support instead of Assault/Support. I understand why they were created the way they were at the time, but fast forward to now and it's regrettable for me. It would have made selecting a support character a lot more interesting and given an opportunity to see Assault as a primary instead of just a secondary as well.

To use a somewhat tired metaphor, I feel that troubled ATs in general need to build "out" and not necessarily "up."

The main source of balance issues is direct comparability. While I feel Blasters need a buff, I think this is in part due to a speciality pileup that makes several ATs too directly comparable too each other. The main pileups involving Blasters looks like this right now:

Blaster-Stalker-Scrapper-Brute-Tanker

It's not lost on me that three of the five ATs involved in that pileup are (until recenty) usually labeled as the most in need of help. They are too comparable to each other and too easy to line up into a simple list. Meanwhile, Dominators and Corruptors do not appear on this list. They don't appear not because they aren't damage dealers but because both have other abilities that make them incomparable to each other. Is a Corruptor better than a Brute? There's no possible answer to that question.

In the discussion on Tankers, my suggestion for fixes was to derail the line up. The question is not about whether you can make Tankers "better" or "worse" than Brutes. It's about rendering that question impossible to answer by making direct comparisons impossible. That is why for Tankers specifically my position is that they need to become force multipliers a la Defender-lite. My solution for the Defender/Corruptor pileup is the same: fix balance issues by pushing the ATs apart. Otherwise you're just engaging in a tug of war that will never be completely resolved.

As another example, a lot of people maintain that Stalkers should be the least survivable melee AT and Tankers the most. But in my model, you derail this. For those two ATs, you might give them something like a 50% chance to ignore death patches (one is agile/tricky and the other very durable) they happen to get caught in. That adds "survivability" without being trapped on the generic "survivability train." Scrappers and Brutes will likely scream "where's mine?" but that expectation of predictable damage-to-survivability models in all situations is exactly what needs to be shut down. In fact, adding survivability is part of what Hide was always intended to do and never was very successful at due to how easy it is for other ATs to get invisibility if they want it.

What this means for Blasters I don't know. Blaster's issue is not just the main pileup, but that Dominators and Corruptors have other qualifications. Corruptors in particular are likely to benefit from any changes to nukes and both would benefit from snipe changes.

I am going to throw two other names out there: Gemstone IV and Dragonrealms. Both are the creations of Simutronics, the company behind the engine used by far-far-MMO. Both are text games. One of them opened its doors in 1990, the other in 1996, and both are still around. Neither of them really are "dungeon crawl team ups" like City of Heroes is, but both showcase a very different kind of interactive world.

I will go as far as to say this: if I were running my own MMO, I would require my developers to play those two games for three months, examine as many systems as possible, then start figuring out how to make them work in a graphical game. Some of the systems are unbelievable: sea travel, spell systems that are based on the alignment of constellations, adjustable spell power where the same power can be used at different strengths, combat with wounds scars and bleeding, variable MP usage depending on your environment, an incredibly extensive library of background RP material. In fact those games are so huge I'm quite sure its impossible to see all of them. Someone needs to be poaching from these games (just like someone needs to poach super sidekicking from CoX).

The answer is you mostly ignore Temporal Selection.

The Gravity hold is probably in your attack chain anyway so no big confusion there.

I agree that the teaming feature is one of the best things City of Heroes offers.

I wish we'd finally get a dedicated channel for it though. Just FYI, the first time I quite CoH (and got reeled back by a later issue) its because I didn't know about global channels.

We shouldn't need global channels for the way they are being used. Just let us talk to each other globally, and not on the Help channel.

[Although I have a simple proposal for something to make that possibly even better: an alerts board. People forming events post to a message board anyone can see from a panel in the game. That way there is no need to spam channels. Basically the reverse of the Looking for Team flag. The important thing is to not over-engineer it like the LFG Queue. Very basic functionality to announce you are leading an event is what the game critically needs, whether that event is a raid, TF, team, or something free form like a costume contest. Truly "leaderless" teams are actually something CoH does NOT do well IMO.]

I think the problem with mezz is actually bigger than Blasters. IMO this is a core combat issue for this game.

Mezz is very binary in City of Heroes. I mean, it's fairly binary in other games too, in the strict sense that you're either mezzed or not. But I've never seen an MMO where your character class more or less was a binary switch for having to deal with mezz and having to not. Even the Tanks in other games get affected by mezz (albiet somewhat less than others).

Ironically, part of the problem is that it's just possible to become too immune. That means the enemies can be given outrageous mezz abilities and most people won't really even notice. To call out one extremely specific example, the sheer number of knockdown/back powers in the game makes obtaining knock protection a virtual requirement. And then once you've flipped that switch you simply never get bothered by that again. A much better set up would have been for there to be far less knockback coming from enemies in the first place, but 100% knockback protection impossible to obtain for anyone but the tankiest Tanker. And then you wouldn't have the sorts of situations we do now, where because the values are so extreme, the way to handle knockback (or defense or resistance or anything else that's gotten out of control) is to just bypass it and make it Unresistable and/or Undodgeable.

Thing is, the way the game is set up, for there to be any sort of equitablity Blasters need straight up mezz protection toggles. I'm not even kidding, not with VEATs and Dominators running around. They're not going to get them, but that's not because of equitability. Rather, it's because the feeling is we bothered putting all this mezz in the game, and why bother doing that if everyone is protected? In other words, its not balanced for individual archetypes it's balanced by the idea that at least someone in the aggregrate of team members is being hit, and that someone is largely Blasters. Blasters won't get mezz immunity not because it would be unbalanced for them, but because the total protection boat can only fit so many.

My general feeling is that mezz protection itself should have chances to fail, and mezzes on players themselves should have be less punishing overall, and far less frequent. And it also turns out there is a model of this already in the game, in the entire structure of the ITF.

Another sidenote here, but it is also my general feeling that if there is one place mezz IS fair is in "death patches." But most of the death patches we've seen have been more out to just outright kill you. A big "dodge this or get mezzed (or debuffed)" would interest me much more.


EDIT: And speaking of death patches, since all of the Blaster T1 and T2s now have identical cast times, I wonder how doable it would be to develop two new animations that allow these powers to be cast by Blasters with no rooting (i.e. all blast sets use the same animation to shoot while running, exception being weapon sets). There is already some established precedent about Blasters being able to use their powers in situations where others can't.

It's a nice nudge if nothing else.

One thing I would like them to do at some point actually is take a look at Defender modifiers for mezzes in general. IMO Defenders should have the same modifiers as Controllers when it comes to mezz values. This won't turn Defenders into Controllers or Dominators because what holds them back is access to actual Control powers and their big AoEs and durations. What it does allow is better justification for the Control-y buff/debuff sets to be more justified as a primary set. That's not exactly a direct buff to Trick Arrow, but it would help even out some issues across the board that arise when a very control-y set gets ported and ends up "better" as a secondary than it was as a primary.

My take on it is, essentially, when a mezz shows up in a buff/debuff set its a mezz acting as a buff/debuff, and Defenders should be very good at that.

I'm debating whether Lawn of the Dead from my sig will be Plant/Dark Controller or Dominator. He has previously been a Plant/Earth Dom, Plant/Psi Dom and Plant/Rad Controller.

The idea of the AoE rezz in Dark Affinity makes the combo at least kind of conceptually funny to me. Arise, my undead plant army. And I guess I could make the Dark powers look like dirt.

I sort of wish there was a plant-y support set. The only thing I have against Dark Affinity is I've already brought Dark Miasma to 50 twice on other character.

For Electric I would consider waiting a few days and going with Dark Assault. Lots of good synergy there and you're unlikely to really miss the cone (its kind of narrow and not my favorite). I haven't kept track of how many powers are DoTs but Gather Shadows is basically a Power Build Up clone (+special and +damage) that lets you bodyslam enemies while you passively drain their endurance in huge gulps too.

Other secondaries are good too, of course.

I'm throwing Dr Aeon into the pot for consideration, less because I think the character might be attractive and more because if this were a movie I can easily see that role being played by Neil Patrick Harris.

I think they have said in the past that removing slotting options from a power is a no-go, so completely removing the damage in Flash Freeze seems very unlikely. Other options would be to make it more useful in other ways or greatly pump up the damage.

The melee modifier should be a lot higher if nothing else.

Elsewhere I suggested raising the radius of AoE attacks, if it is feasible.