Oliin

Is the server actually back up yet? Last I heard it was supposed to be down until 5 PST.

Oh, I didn't mean here exactly, more just in general. Still, it wouldn't have been the worst side-track I've ever seen on these forums.

I'd put that one down into the funny category personally.

By all means, please do. I can agree with you anecdotally, but you probably have nice solid numbers and the like to back up your opinion.

The account server is currently down. So if you're on the beta server it will think that you're a free player until you can synch up with it and you also won't be able to buy any of the new powersets (since the store connects to the account server it's down too).

They're trying to fix it.

Also, make sure you've got the beta client installed and not the test client.

Well, I know it usually takes a few days after you've signed up for the game for an account to have access to the test server (or so I've been told, my account hasn't yet lapsed). I would imagine it's the same thing with the beta server.

For what it's worth all you're missing out on right now is just the 'free' content since the store's been down most of the time.

They actually made an announcement in-game on the beta server that there is no NDA, they just haven't taken down that part of the beta client yet. They may have mentioned it on the boards by now, but if they haven't they probably should.

[Admin] NCsoft_Beastyle: Folks just an FYI, there is NO NDA on the VIP beta. The NDA is just leftover, but it's been lifted. =)

So I was online at one point yesterday when the store was up. I bought the new powersets and placed my paragon reward tokens (whee energy wings). Everything for my character seems to be functioning just fine. I can use my incarnate powers, the character showed up as a rogue, and I have all of my various slots for characters and salvage and whatnot.

It seems like it's a case of once you have it it's yours, but it needs to synch up and verify things with the account server first. About all I can't do at the moment is buy new things and claim certificates (which is mildly annoying on low-level characters who can't get their staves and various helpful temp pwoers).

Well, you know that the APP powers are generally nerfed in some way in comparison to the same power from a class that would 'usually' have the thing. Right? For the damage and control powers that's generally just a doubled recharge time as opposed to a damage reduction (which is nifty since a scrappers ranged modifier is completely horrible ... so they made the ranged powers just use their melee modifier instead).

If you look at the damage from the scrapper's APP attacks they're all completely in-line with the damage for either the same blaster's power or for a blaster's power of similar (halfed) recharge (with the possible exception of the blaze mastery APP). Heck, if you factor in crits they're more damaging.

On that note though, if buffing the damage of the scrapper's APP blasts means a buff for the ranged blasts' damage across the board that's certainly fine by me. Just buffing all the Scrapper APPs to be in line with one out of balance APP seems a little bit of a bad idea though.

I imagine it's an artifact of the old implementation of auto-turret where you placed an immobile turret on the ground (that you could actually teleport around using recall friend). It would have been odd to have a character set up a immobile turret in mid-air.

Really? I mean it's been more than a decade since I read the series, but one of the things I remember about the thing was that it was set in the future on a failed colony planet and that there were other little sci-fi tidbits laying around the story.

Indeed.

I was actually rather surprised to see that series on there to be honest. I really enjoyed it when I was younger, and I still have some extremely dog-eared copies of the books laying around, but I don't know if I'd put them in a 'Top X' list.


Going back over my votes, it appears that I only voted for one single 'new' book, and that was Sanderson's The Way of Kings. Other than that I voted for generally older stuff, or at least things not from the last decade.

• The Demolished Man
• The Diamond Age
• Don't Bite the Sun
• Dune
• Ender's Game
• The Left Hand of Darkness
• The Once and Future King
• Parable of the Sower
• The Worm Ouroboros

Oh man, I was just going through and noticed I forgot to vote for I Am Legend. Dangit.

Bah, typos. I should really stop trying to post before going to bed. But yea, first three powers at 4 for everyone really is fantastic. I remember before I got my city traveler badge that wait to 14 (no matter how quickly I progressed the character real-time wise) always seemed interminable.

No, it's more like how the City Traveler vet reward lets you pick any of the first three powers in the travel pools at level 3 instead of needing to pick one prerequisite and then the travel power at 14. You'll just be able to pick from the first three powers in the pools at level 4.

Also I think it effects all the power pools, but I'm really not sure though. You do still need to have two powers from the pool to take the fourth tier power at 20 though. Oh, and the travel pools are getting a fifth power (fast flight, immediate recharge for speed, a shield charge type power for jump, zone teleport).

Or at least that's my understanding of it all anyway.

Pretty much the same here, though I'm too lazy to bind it to anything, so instead I spend far effort as needed actually typing out the whole word. Yea, it doesn't make much sense when I think about it ....


On a side note ... "yee haw"? Does anyone ever actually say that?

Oh I know. I've had my energy/dev since what ... a couple weeks after release. I actually made the character for concept, but then found out a few weeks later it was apparently one of the more OPed powersets in the game. Couldn't bring myself to take smoke grenade after that until the fix was live, it felt too much like cheating.

That's not something I'd ever really recommend in as anything but an option of last resort either. It's just painful to set up that many. It works, but yeesh. I generally just run in, toe bomb, use the bomb's delay in going off to back out of immediate range and maybe hit aim, and then just blast. I really only have difficulties with carnie bosses.

It's the long, interruptible animation times that really makes it hard for me to consider the top three powers in devices as effective defiance buff boosters. It's impossible to keep up their extra buffage which severely limits their usefulness as such on longer fights, and if you try to stack them like in your suggestion they only end up being useful for one big punch versus the attack chain you can get off with aim+bu.

To me that sort of implies that was the dev's intention in leaving build up out of the devices powerset. It's really always seemed more of an unintentional side-effect than anything else to me. That would imply that they planned defiance 2.0 somewhat around the devices powerset specifically and I don't really think they did that.

But you're still kind of gimped in that regard though. What would take another secondary 1.17 seconds to accomplish takes a devices blaster 16 seconds, and even then it's a almost 10% less of a damage buff and doesn't have the (minor) to-hit buff from build up. Then on top of that it would take a considerable amount of recharge in order to get the powers a devices blaster needs to come back even remotely quickly (time bomb is a base 6 minute recharge power) whereas build up comes back in 90 seconds unenhanced.

I'm not saying it's a bad strategy, but I generally find it fits my play-style better to just drop a trip mine and use aim if I'm fighting a tough boss than to do this. Or heck, aim+trip mine+nuke works fairly well if you just want to flatten a group. They mine generally decides to go off right around when the nuke hits so you get that extra little bit of damage in there. I don't believe it's nearly as nice as aim+bu+nuke though, but what can you do.

I've found that to often be true myself. There's something somewhat entertaining about a failure if you're teamed with the right people. It only really holds true for the first couple failures (and just plain team wipes too) after that though it just gets frustrating and people start getting a little angry.

Honestly I've been chalking that up to there being eight credited writers on the film myself. Mostly because too many cooks does seem to make a movie somewhat lacking in emotional impact in my experience. Also because just based on the deleted scenes I've watched and commentaries I've heard on the Iron Man movies and Elf (the only 3 Favreau directed films I've watched) the scenes that seem to be cut from the films don't seem to be ones that add much to the film.

Of course, I could be wrong on that.

Ahh, so it's an internet vetted joke then. I see.

I was kind of figuring you got the joke from somewhere but had just slapped together the picture in a couple minutes for the heck of it to be honest.

That has, generally speaking, been my opinion as well. Unfortunately for us I really don't think that the games mechanics really lend themselves to much more of a damage increase for blasters. Or really much more of a damage increase for any of the 'damage' ATs.

Ok, so absolutely horrible picture aside, that's funny. I'm not sure exactly what doesn't 'click' for me about the OP's but it just doesn't quite. Maybe it's because I'm really not familiar with the meme.