Oedipus_Tex

Desdemona. Clearly.

I have a Ice/Fire/Fire and Ice/Energy/Ice. Both pretty good in different ways. The Ice/Fire is a bit more offensive, but that actually comes a lot from the Fire APP. Ice/Energy surprised me in that I expected it to suck much worse than it did, but it holds its own. I do miss Consume from Fire on Energy tho.

Ice/Dark, available in the next issue, looks promising.

Note you may be able to increase your satisfaction with Ice/Psi by picking up Fire as your APP pool. You won't have the single target damage or Embrace of Fire but Fireball and Rain of Fire (plus RotP) add a LOT of AoE damage.

Also note that I personally play Ice as a "donut range" set and not a "melee" one. I do get close to enemies but very rarely am right on top of them. Below is a video I made a few weeks ago showing that concept on Ice/Fire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHiBCFPDOU

I would have the initial burst of damage be non-notify (they may know they've been hit, but they don't know where it came from), and only make the target/group aware of the strike several seconds after the initial shot. You would thus get a "free" attack on a difficult enemy before starting the fight, but still be able to open with something else.

PS I agree they should do more damage.

Gorgeous set. Really an amazing achievement, both for City of Heroes and the level of customization in MMOs in general.

I do wish we could combine beards with the helmet, but I understand why that's not possible.

I had someone once deliberately taunt Marauder through the gate because the trial wasn't going well. We only had two or three minutes left on the clock and probably would have failed anyway, but it was still kind of annoying. Much like failing TPN due to someone killing citizens or failing UG because UG has abysmal mechanics, much about winning the trials involves making sure no single individual undoes what 23 others are doing. That doesn't make the trials "hard" but it does, IMO, make them unideal for how they are being used. The fact that people rarely intentionally (or accidentally--the trials have no qualms about making sure your uninformed mistakes bring the rest of your league down with you) invoke these mechanics doesn't really address the fact that they are, for whatever reason, there.

The Confuse the UG boss uses is especially irritating, for a different reason. Leagues who prepare for it will never actually face it, so the question becomes why even have it, except to make us spend time standing outside the trial preparing for it? The end result of several of these kinds of mechanics, along with the rezz penalty in MOM, is that the best leagues sail through without even seeing what these trials can dish out, and the worst ones are Nintendo-hard meatgrinder screaming-match death trains that serve mainly to reinforce why you should stack the deck before starting instead of using the LFG queue all of this was supposed to be built to support.

The myth is that there is a widespread myth about "hard" trials. This is a strawman thread if ever I saw one.

Unless you mean "hard to justify playing in the volumes demanded by the game" or "hard to consider successful in achieving its original design goals."

I don't care whether you call UG trial "hard," "gimmicky," or just "based almost entirely on planning ahead to counter the high magnitude Confuse the end boss throws at you." It's just an unremarkable experience, not that different than other weak boss fights in other games.

Also, in regards to Hamidon: [Link bleeped]

EDIT: Link won't work due to bleeped word in the title, so just get there by clicking the first link in this Google search:

I never complain about Energy Blasters but I do often leave teams that recruit too many of them. Knocking back individual enemies isn't a big deal to me. AoE knockback is 90% harmful though. I don't really say anything about it to other players because I don't feel like dealing with the fight, I just leave, usually with a neutral statement like "Thanks for the team, I need to head out."

For the former, PGA or Fire armor depending. RoTP beore both if you don't have that already.

For the kin, the latter, then take Barrier to Tier 4, which has a low end value of 5% defense.

The existence of Recharge debuffs should be enough to convince most players skipping Hasten is usually a losing deal on any build. Suffice it to say this: Hasten in some situations gives a bigger buffer against Recharge debuffs than some actual armor resistance powers do. A 70 point difference in Recharge is pretty significant considering the debuff floor is -75%.

I agree that slotting Recharge at the expense of all else is usually a sub-optimal deal. I might make an exception for some Illusion Controllers (but only some).

I agree with the OP about Blasters overall.

I'm not 100% convinced that just adding more damage fixes the issue though. The issue may be that they don't do enough damage in lateral ways (based on target caps, based on enemy rank, etc). Just throwing higher damage numbers is IMO not going to fix everything the AT is struggling with.

"Damage as a defense" though was always IMO unfortunately a fairly unrealistic proposition. I don't have a specific solution, but I can say with some degree of authority you will never do enough damage for that to work out in practice, because survivabilility will always have a different curve than kill rate.

Seemingly sidelong issue that is IMO integral to the problem: Mezz protection as a whole in this game is wonky as heck. The whole mezz = detoggle/suppress business combined with melee ATs just being functionally immune to 95% of the mezz thrown around (and BOY is it thrown around) to me creates a pretty much impossible equation for AT balance. There's pretty much no fixing that now because it's so integrated into the game, but I wish when the designers were deciding what and how many mezzes an enemy should deal, that they looked more closely at how severely it tilts the play field. This is the only game I ever played where all of the melee ATs are just flat out immune to control powers, and everyone else gets mezzed constantly, dropping their armor and preventing them from using potions/inspirations unless they stocked the right one to break the mezz first. What I will say for it is, "Having now seen it, I would never recommend such an implementation again to a new game."

It didn't seem to work in Block of Ice. The power was grayed out and I wasnt even able to slot it, from what I could see on screen. I don't know if that is just a bug or if my vision is just that poor. I would test it if I didn't already have it slotted in the AoE immobilize.

Short version: I think the crux of this issue is that if the solo path is too forgiving, it actually becomes the optimal path and this game becomes all about farming (again). Striking a balance will be difficult.

Longer version: I have some pretty severe criticisms of the trials, but at the same time think a truly "solo" path in this game is especially hard to implement because there are such vast differences between powersets and archetypes when soloing. I'm not making the "If it's not soloable by Empathy Defender its broken" type of argument here--I mean that a game that has dispensed with a meaningful definition of "overperformance" can no longer gauge its rate of rewards, and the direct casualty of that is simply moving the rewards away to a different activity.

I thought the original shard system was more or less reasonable. It did take a while but it was doable. Task Forces made it faster. The trials probably made it too fast, in the sense that they pushed a trial-trial-trial agenda that wore people out quickly. So the issue might really be that the trials just handed out too much. Had they held back more or been set up more like the TF system instead of all-the-time activities it might not have been as bad.

[Also, since I'm feeling passive agressive and haven't had a chance to post this too much ately, level shifts are awful and never should have happened. 9/10ths of the issues cropping up in the incarnate system can be traced back to the introduction of this mechanic, including, to some extent, the solo issue, which is really going to show now that they will apply to an entire zone. Although I am mainly a team player in the rest of the game, part of the reason I even have the desire for solo content is that I'm tired of my newer incarnates playing the same two (maybe three with Keyes) trials over and over, and mostly sucking at it, until they can level shift and play the other 4 for very little reason at all. If we absolutely must have markers of incarnate progress, it should take the form of direct buffs or debuffs to various stats and NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT levels, which curve like a ledge overlooking the Grand Canyon.]

I just like having new stuff in the game. Even if I am not the one actually playing the set.

I mean, just ending up on a team with people playing Titan Weapons or other stuff changes gameplay for me somewhat. And even though I'm not the hugest fan of trials all the time, seeing 24 players with completly unique builds, then jumping on another trial and more or less seeing 24 more unique builds, is something I haven't witnessed in a MMO basically ever. CoH may have its flavors of the month, but compared to every other MMO really does encourage experimentation.

If you have left over Paragon Points you could buy enhancement boosters. 5 invested in one of Hasten's two slots roughly equals one extra slot. You can cut corners on a few other powers this way.

Spiritual doesnt work with Domination anyway (although Ageless Destiny does).

Small update. Played with it more, and it is indeed based on how often you cast. Each stack appears to only last about 15 or 20 seconds at a time as reported before. However it also appears it can only stack 3 times within one minute, possibly longer. If it fires 3 times right away, then 40 seconds or more go by with nothing additional. It's not a bad bonus, but not altogether amazing either from what I can see so far. It's also possible its not working as intended.

I just got this proc randomly and it can indeed be slotted in Arctic Air. I'm unsure exactly how it would work, and that probably isn't optimal slotting anyway--slotting the full set means giving up Contagious Confusion, which you should never do.

I noted that my Ice/Energy Dom has the option to slot it in Whirling Hands, Bone Smasher, and Total Focus. It can NOT be slotted in Block of Ice--which is weird, if it can be slotted in Char. It CAN however be slotted in the single target immobilize.

The actual wording for the proc is "has a chance to fire roughly 3 times per minute." I dont know if this means it just fires on its own accord or actually requires the power to be used. I sloted it in Frostbite and spammed the power in an AE mission and didn't actually see it do anything.

One thing I do like about the geysers is they are one of the few interactive environmental elements in the game. For the most part, giant fans dont blow you backward, radioactive columns don't stun you, and you can jump as far in outer space as you can in Mexico City. But I agree that they don't actually work, and also that the Shadow Shard is kind of a shame. It's one zone that I often feel could be fixed just by making it interesting. It's pretty, but there are way to few landmarks or actual things worth seeing (a badge is not "worth seeing" in my opinion).

FWIW I am really very strongly against Shiver becoming a mezz or typical debuff. IMO a change like that would be make the set even more aggressively anti-synergistic. Dark Control can hop in, stun the enemies, and then hop back out and go about its business. Ice needs to stand on top of enemies over the long haul. That's why I suggested Shiver be a -Range cone, to make enemies run toward you and your aura. If we're talking about things that would help my Ice characters out, massive Shiver changes like would not. They actually have the potential to make the set even more frustrating to play.

MOM's rezz system isn't technically broken.

It is, however, fundamentally awful.