Oliin

Not always true. What powers from devices would you use to fill out an attack chain?

So pretty much about what I was thinking then. Personally I'd rather have different shirts than I would different topless skin types, but that's mostly personal bias talking there.

I do think it's kind of unfortunate that they nixed male-specific costume pieces, but I can understand why they did it. There's much more overlap between the "men's" clothing that's socially acceptable for women to wear than the other way around.

Thank you for that by the way. I honestly laughed at that one.

It's somewhat 'common' knowledge that only a small percentage of the playerbase tends to visit a game's forums. It's because of that I really wish games would implement a way to do optional polls from in the game.

I mean I suppose if they did that then people would raise holy heck if they didn't get exactly what they wanted from the polling but it would give somewhat more of a 'voice' to that mass of players who don't visit the forums.

Just how many different types of topless chests do you need? I mean I guess you could keep on tossing out different skin types or tattoo patterns, but I don't know how huge a draw that would be overall.

It's not quite exactly the same thing, but Arbiter Hawk had this to say just a while ago: A bad power choice that's not worth taking is kind of synonymous with "annoying or not worth it" though in my mind.

I can kind of see the confusion, since crit rate is a % chance and all. Of course at that point common sense should kick in, but lord knows 'common sense' is a misnomer if there ever was one.

Personally I'm pretty much ok with what we have now with regards to mez but that doesn't mean that it's outside the realm of possibility that blasters do need more to that effect. I mean just because something's been improved once and is better than it used to be doesn't mean it won't ever need further adjustment in the future. Not that I exactly think it's the area of blasters that needs improvement though.

I've still always thought those four other ATs had better ways of dealing with mez than most blasters did before they got the partial mez protection thing. They had really solid debuffs, good buffs, shields with partial mez resistances in them (controllers even get a mez resistance shield in their ancillary pool), and masterminds have their pets that can act even while their owner is being held. Now there's still unfortunate powerset combinations there that'll have problems with mez, but the ATs as a whole had less issues with mez than blasters used to.

So I've always considered giving blasters partial mez protection in defiance to be more of a raising them up to be somewhat on-par with the rest of the ATs in the game than giving them an advantage over any other AT. Not that I suppose that's any consolation to a thermal defender or anything.

I know I don't really need any change with regards to mez on my blasters, but then I also don't really play my leveling blasters at the high difficulties that I can on any of my melee characters. So I generally can defeat what mezed me before it takes me out using my T1 and T2 attacks.

I don't really feel comfortable saying blasters need no changes with regard to mez because of that though and I'm really not sure what advantage they have because of defiance.

All the other damage ATs either have mez protection which keeps them from being mezed in the first place (in most cases) or have powers that work like break frees. Blasters can use their three lowest tier powers. In one case one of those powers is melee range(though I think it possibly functions the best for keeping me alive while mezed) and in another case it actually does no damage at all.

I'm not trying to say defiance's attacking through mez sucks, but I don't see it as an advantage over what the other damage ATs have either. It's just kind of there, and for me it works fairly well to be honest.

You know, I was just looking at mids. It looks like Dominators actually come extremely close with the single target DPS, or at least they do in the case of Energy Assault/Energy Blast. I actually think an energy Dominator would outdamage my energy Blaster with single target.

I doubt it's the case with all sets, but yeesh that's close. The only single target blast Energy Blast has that does more damage than Energy Assault (according to mids) is Power Bolt.


Edit: Not trying to accuse dominators of doing more damage than blasters. I don't play them often and I'm really not terribly familiar with their secondaries. I was just looking at ranged damage and was a little surprised by energy assault.

That's fairly impressive. Is that straight from ranged or blapping? I know my tricked-out blaster only does about 160dps from range. Of course it's an energy/dev blaster. I don't think it can come anywhere close to one of the better scrapper builds in terms of dps.

So 'king of ranged damage' is simply just having more ranged attacks, not actually doing more damage with those same attacks? I always kind of figured it'd be both.

Not all that many, but some combinations can have 5 or so and all of them have access to at least two. Still you can't really say blasters are king of ranged damage when that scrapper over there does more damage with their blasts than I do with the exact same powers (crits and all).

As I said before, those numbers while technically accurate don't reflect reality. Melee ATs use their melee damage mod for their ranged damage, the list doesn't include VEATs which have a 1.0 damage mod and kheld's nova form uses a 1.2 damage mod (I believe).

Edit: A more accurate list would look something like this:

To be fair I imagine Chyll meant that Blasters are the kings of ranged damage not range in general. Specifically stating that no other AT has a ranged damage mod anywhere close to blasters ... which isn't true.

Personally I don't see any need to be the king of range (as in distance you attack from) in CoH. I can play my energy/dev blaster from range and all it usually gets me is no buffs (most defenders/controllers/corrupters either run into melee to buff the folks there or their buffs are based off of hitting enemies) and very few heals (since again, heals are off enemies or people go into/near melee to pbaoe heal them there). I'm actually generally much better off fighting with my ranged blasts just on the edge of being in melee range of the enemies.

Nah, that's just a fantastic costume using a piece or two from the new set (which is also kind of fantastic).

As I mentioned just above Scrappers use their melee modifier in place of their ranged one. So they have a 1.125 mod for both melee and range attacks. Stalkers should be using their melee mod for their ranged attacks too. Granted, neither of those ATs are heavy ranged ones.

VEATs have both a melee and ranged mod of 1.0 and I believe nova form for khelds bumps their ranged mod effectively above the 1.0 level. I might be slightly mistaken on that last one though.

I seem to recall a comment by Synapse that crashing nukes would be looked at. Or at least him putting out feelers to that effect.

I might be misremembering though.

I'm not really sure how much of a damage mod increase the game can support, but it'd be nice to get our ranged damage mod to 1.2 or 1.25 at least. I think to 'fix' the AT solely through a damage mod increase would require a much higher one than that though which would likely do horrible things to game balance.

As an aside though, it's always kind of bugged me that the melee ATs use their melee damage modifier for their few ranged attacks. I mean, I understand why they changed it over, but why not just bump their ranged damage mods instead.

If your secondary build is primarily a solo one then I'd suggest dropping the shields in favor of picking Infrigidate back up (it's a nice debuff against against tougher targets) and Arctic Fog (its stealth should help you pick your battles and it provides some resistance and defense).

If you take Super Speed back up as your travel power then it combined with Arctic Fog will combine to make you (almost) completely invisible to enemies.


Unfortunately there are several defender primary sets that are far more about improving group members than themselves and Cold Domination is one of them (though not the worst of the set).

Something like that would be nice. Ideally I'd love to see them have an in-combat/out-of-combat sort of mechanic like Stalker's AS will be getting in I22.

When used while you're out of combat they work like you mentioned above. In combat however they have a 1.something animation time and have either about the same or slightly less damage as they do currently. They'd also have to be able to reduce the in-combat range to 80 (or possibly less), it's accuracy to 75%(instead of 90%), and possibly just bump it's recharge to 15 like AS. If they did that then it becomes not only a useful opener but useful in a ranged attack chain as well.

Yes. You have to finish slotting a tier before you can progress on to placing tokens in the next.