Oliin

Actually, it's probably in line with the idea, if your approximate 77 damage was without the crit.

Blaster snipes are 7.6 BI (except for fire's), stalker's snipes are (according to the devs) supposed to be slightly less powerful than the blaster's version when you include the snipe. So, since focus has more than half of a snipe's BI, I'd expect the base damage of the stalker's snipe to be lower than that.

Personally I'm not a fan of even the blaster snipes. The damage is sub-par for all that wind up and trouble. A ranged assassin's strike it's not.

Also, if the interruptable activation time is 1.5 to 2 times the blaster version, you have my sympathies.

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, man. I love the sense of humor at Cryptic.

Dr. Forrester

[/ QUOTE ] Press the button Frank.

And yea, it's a very nice looking zone, I just wish I could go into any missions without crashing, and then being unnable to log that version of the character again.

[ QUOTE ]
I really think that was a bad design idea. Wouldn't it have been better to make the Patron powers blue? Or are all villain players who use electricty supposed to be Mu?

[/ QUOTE ] Well, there is that one story arc where you find that book that proves there's some absurdly huge percentage of the world's population that's in some way descended from the Mu. So it wouldn't be that much of a strech I suppose.

[ QUOTE ]
4: You don't have imagination. BS, plain and simple. If we didn't have imagination in the first place, this entire argument wouldn't exist.

[/ QUOTE ] It doesn't strike me so much as a lack of imagination, just a lack of flexibility. You refuse to bend in your creativity and come up with reasons (however convoluted) for characters to have any of the APPs. I honestly think, given some of the great character concepts out there that I've seen, most of you could easily come up with reasons to be taking the patron pools. You just don't want to.

[ QUOTE ]
As for serious gaming: I certainly didn't mean to imply that anyone wanting this kind of gameplay doesn't take their entertainment seriously. Apologies to all who felt I did. I meant that I, me, myself and I, do not consider blow-it-all-up, arcade-type video-gaming to be 'serious entertainment' for me.

[/ QUOTE ] You might want to change your use of words in general then. You know, not call frenetic, action oriented gameplay adolescent and childish. Doing so only serves to upset people who happen to enjoy that style of gameplay on any level and give them the feeling that you're belittling their likes and generally considering yourself superior to them.

Personally, I hardly think that a person's likes, as far as gaming goes, are in and of themselves indicitive of their maturity level. I mean, what you consider 'adult' gaming is really just another style of game that a person either likes or doesn't. Heck, there's plenty of people out there that consider any form of video gaming as entertainment itself the epitome of childishness, right up there with watching cartoons.

<shrug> That's just me though I suppose.

[ QUOTE ]
In terms of kills to death ratio, Blasters are slightly behind scrappers with EM, but competing with Defenders and Dominators for lowest value Note, that these are solo values!

[/ QUOTE ] Ok, pardon, but for some reason this comment confuses me. It's saying blasters are behind scrappers definately(slightly). But is it saying that they're down near dominators and defenders in having the worst survivability, or is it basically saying that dominators and defenders are suprisingly survivable in PvP?

[ QUOTE ]
If, as the devs had said, toggle dropping is going to be toned down/ditched......then this statement from Castle contradicts that.

[/ QUOTE ] Toned down is nowhere near 'ditched'. It's lowered in frequency yes, but not completely removed. So take it to mean that even after toggle dropping's reduced in frequency it's still going to happen. You are, however, probably going to see less attacks that can drop three toggles at a time, with likely somewhat lower frequencies of the detoggles happening.

[ QUOTE ]
Well 99% of the time the only 2ndry sets I see in any pvp format are EM and Electric. So if everybody is playing them, then the sets are broken.

[/ QUOTE ] Actually, according to comments from the devs, those are the secondaries that are preforming as intended. It's the rest of the sets that have issues. Well, either that or it's just a general perception that the other secondaries aren't as good. One of the two.

[ QUOTE ]
The last word States gave blasters on their team role was that they're ranged damage, but there isn't a single set that can sustain a truely ranged attack chain.

[/ QUOTE ] Yea. My 50 can chain all her blasts consinuously, but I have waaay more recharge reducers in my blasts than most sane folks would use. The thing that bothers me about the whole 'ranged damage' comment though is that I'm really not sure exactly WHAT ranged damage is. Is it more or less than scrappers? Exactly how much range? Most importantly just why does a team want or need ranged damage?

I PMed the devs asking that a while back, got a read recipt but no response. Didn't figure I'd get one though. All I really want is a response to the last question really. I mean I can understand the role of 'controll', I can understand 'damage', 'tank', 'buff/debuff' are all likewise easy. However, to me 'ranged damage' is just about as generic and as BS a role as 'puller'.

But that's just me.

[ QUOTE ]
In answer to the OP: yes, I would feel better if scrappers were clearly superior to blasters in melee. From a purely balance perspective, blasters should never have an advantage, no matter how short term, over a scrapper, tanker, or brute, in melee range.

[/ QUOTE ] Actually, from a purely balance perspective, it kinda makes sense. Risk vs. reward and all that, blasters risk more going into melee and get a bit of a better reward for doing so.

Now on a personal level, I'd perfer it if blasters didn't do as much damage as a scrapper in melee, but outdamaged scrappers in melee from range. Of course, that'd likely break the game, so it's not going to happen.

[ QUOTE ]
At this rate, we'll be playing "City of Jem and the Holograms" before we get some fixes.

[/ QUOTE ] Argh! Now you've gone and gotten that blasted song stuck in my head.

[ QUOTE ]
Alright, I must have missed something. Is there any stated reason why so many visible people involved in the game are jumping ship? Is there some kind of culling happening among the staff? Some kind of general unhappiness with the working conditions at Cryptic/NCsoft?

[/ QUOTE ] To reiterate, the folks leaving are NCSoft people*. More than likely they're being shifted to work on another game NCSoft is coming out with. It's happened before, it'll probably happen again.

*I'm not completely sure about Artic_Sun, but I think so.

[ QUOTE ]
It'd be nice to have a sticky with the listing of who does what so we can send messages to the right person, instead of everyone sending them to Cuppa and hopeing she passes them on.

[/ QUOTE ] It would be kind of nice to know who all works on the game, and who does what. Though, I do believe the whole forwarding of information IS part of Cuppa's job and all, so even if most of the folks don't take PMs it'd still be fun to know.

And aside from Lord Recluse I can't think of any actual Cryptic employees who've actually left for another job. It's pretty much always been NCSoft folks who get shuffled around to work on other games, like Auto Assault and the like. So all the folks 'leaving' isn't quite nearly as bad as it may look.

[ QUOTE ]
I have to agree gamespot sucks, i can hear but i can't see it. I can't download it, and i'm not going to sign up again just to get their junk mail all over again.

[/ QUOTE ] While the first part is true, the whole not being able to see the video's likely not their problem. I'd been having that issue (along with some videos locking my computer) up untill I recently updated all my codecs and my video driver. Hopefully that'll fix the issue for ya.

[ QUOTE ]
They need to rework Defiance so that it works like Vigilance: damage taken by teammates ups a Blaster's Defiance meter. Pow. Tankers have a definite role on the team and Blasters can be damage juggernauts. 90% of Blaster problems gone.


[/ QUOTE ] You know, that might actually make it fun to have.

Anyhoo. My thoughts.

Primaries:
Ice, Fire and AR are all generally percieved as doing ok. Why? Fire and AR do a considerable amount of AoE damage, Ice and to an extent Fire have speedy animations on their single target attacks, and Fire has fairly high BIs on all of its attacks.

That said, for archery I'd bump its AoE damage closer to the Fire/AR level. For the rest of the sets, being more single target oriented, I'd reduce recharges closer to that of Ice and/or increase their BIs so as to have a fairly standard level of damage output across the sets. I'd also increase the range on the short attacks to at least the same 50 as Ice's BIB.

Another thought being, give Aim a small (2%-3%) chance of letting attacks crit. The same idea could be worked into the TD with perhaps a lower percentage instead of giving it a straight damage buff ability.

I don't, off the top of my head know what I'd do about the secondary sets. I do know I don't like the target toggled AoE damage idea for blazing aura and lightning field. Too much could go horribly wrong with that for my liking. Now, if you changed them to a ground targeted effect and added in a slow component, or a chance to hold for a very short duration ... something like that, then I think they'd be nice. Heck, it'd even mirror the whole terrain controll ability /dev gets with caltrops and /ice has in Ice Patch.

I'd love to expand a bit more on this, but I have to get off to class. Hopefully I'll get back to it later.

[ QUOTE ]

Exemplar/Malefactor to someone doing the mission and you will get the badge when they do.

We do not want to make the missions in the PvP zones go all the way to 50, because then a character could literally spend all his time in that zone, never needing to leave except to visit stores, and that is gameplay we dont want to encourage.

[/ QUOTE ] Yea, was this fixed recently? Because as someone else has said, the only time I've ever seen the patroll badge awarded was when it was your patroll mission. Nobody on any team I've been on has ever been awarded the badge unless it was their mission, not even if they were the same level as the mission holder.

Now, of course, it's been a little while since I've done any of those missions and I may have missed a patch note somewhere, but that's been my experience.

Did some testing of defiance myself tonight over in the arena. Had a friend of mine smack me down to a certain defiance point value and then I'd blas them, repeat at the same level and then I picked another point value and tested that one. All the tests of supposedly max defiance were run with my character (Ikube) having less than 10 hps ouf of her max 1385.5.

Sure it's not the most complete list, but it's what my friend had time to help me test.

100% life (1 defiance) = +0% buff (100% damage)
50% life (3 defiance) = +12% buff
30% life (14 defiance) = +56%
Aim = +63%(ish) buff
20% life (33 defiance) = +131%
5% life (100 defiance) = +300% (400% damage, old damage cap)
And, just for the heck of it.
5% life + aim (100def+63ish% damage buff) = +300%

For comparison [ QUOTE ]

166.8 HP : 100% HP : 36.59 energy damage - 100%
92.9 HP : 55.7% HP : 39.62 energy damage - 108%
81.6 HP : 48.92% HP : 41.34 energy damage - 113%
73.2 HP : 43.88% HP : 45 energy damage - 123%
40.2 HP : 24.1% HP : 70.98 energy damage - 193%
38.2 HP : 22.9% HP : 76.86 energy damage - 210%
15 HP : 8.99% : 95.38 energy damage - 260%

[/ QUOTE ]from Blueeyed's test and
[ QUOTE ]
=>50% Health: +18% damage buff
< 40% Health: +35% damage buff
< 30% Health: +70% damage buff
< 20% Health: +140% damage buff
< 10% Health: +280% damage buff
< 5% Health: +400% (this is the damage cap for Blasters as of Issue 5)

[/ QUOTE ]From the feature updates article on the subject.

Blueeyed's and my tests seem to sync up fairly well I think, and both of them fit against the only given numbers we currently have ... a little bit poorly, but not too terribly badly, untill you hit what's supposed to be the blaster damage cap.

Nothing I could do was able to bring me up above the old cap of 400% damage. That leads me to the questino devs. Did we actually get our cap increased, or is there some coding going on to keep us from hitting our cap without outside buffs no matter what we do?

PS. I am not, usually much of a number cruncher. So I'll grant that my math may not be 100% accurate, but give or take a couple % points here and there I stand by my numbers given the (admitedly) smallish set of numbers I grabbed with my friend.

PPS. Blueeyed. Yea, gocha. Sorry, was just reading that bit wonkily every time apparently. <shrug> Go figure.

[ QUOTE ]
The build up and such is just an example of a possible attack series against a target. The point was that, with even low values of Defiance, you can actually 'save' attacks.

[/ QUOTE ] You were using the wrong power as an example then, as you'd have to be fairly well and hurt in order to see a similar increase to that of BU. Heck, in my testing tonight I didn't even see an increase that outstripped aim untill I tried the 20% life test(around 33 on the defiance bar). It is significantly outstripped at that point though. The closest I got in my testing what with 14 points of defiance, or around 30% life, which was a 6% damage buff below that of aim. So yea, perhaps 25-28% life before you even outstrip aim, and actually perhaps 23% before you oustrip that of BU. That's not quite 'low' values.

While you do have a point, the 'low levels' of defiance is more applicable to popping a (low or medium) red than it is hitting aim or BU. Depending on the mob that can help me out, but also depending it can leave me needing to do still just a sliver more damage to really fight any more effectively.

It just really all depends.

[ QUOTE ]
For example, my Elec/En can either use a combination of a BU, and a Lightning Bolt, and an Energy Punch to kill a single enemy, or I can switch and instead use a BU, Lightning and a Charged Bolt, saving the Punch for another target.

[/ QUOTE ] Ok then. Perhaps I'm just being a bit dense, given that I'm up a bit later than I should be at the moment, but what does using BU have to do with defiance? Or were you just using it as an example of a predictable damage increase? If you were it'd probably have been more on topic to use the example of an instance where you planned knocking yourself down to around 20% life to get the (theoretically) 140% damage buff from defiance yes?

Of course, it's not quite the same thing. Most folks don't usually look at a group of mobs and think, "Ok, first thing I need to do is get myself smacked around a lot, then I'll have enough defiance to take care of them easily." Just like, by the same token, folks don't really depend on crits in a fight either. Neither of them are planned things in a fight.

Well, I suppose you could plan a fight with defiance in mind, specifically knocking yourself down to a very low amount of HPs, but it's somewhat tempting fate to do so.

Was playing my brute tonight, and for once thought to check my accuracy. My powers had hit between 77% and 87% of the time. Which was quite consistent (and a little bit higher) than the rates expected given how the attacks were slotted.

That said. My misses seemed to be heavily clumped together. I'd have a nice string of hits followed by something like 3-9 misses in a row.

Overall, what with the very streaky nature of my misses it just felt less accurate than it was. It's especially annoying when a boss or LT's trying to beat on your corruptor friend and you miss for a good 9 seconds straight. /grumble

[ QUOTE ]
There is no "Accuracy Wrap Around" -- otherwise Blasters with Targetting Drone + Aim + Build Up would never, ever hit, which is not the case.

[/ QUOTE ] Assuming that's TD+Aim/Aim+BU, since I can't think of any combination of powersets that'd have all 3 together

But yes, as has been stated, experience tends to lend credence to the accuracy wraparound theory. At least before ED went into the game when my drone was slotted five times for accuracy, if I popped a yellow or hit aim I'd all of a sudden start missing extremely frequently(read as, I'd hit once in a blue moon). It got to the point where if I wanted to use aim at all for the damage bonus I'd actually toggle off the drone because from experience I knew if I didn't I'd waste all attacks while it was active due to missing the mob. The same goes for when I accidentally used accuracy inspirations.

Since ED went in I haven't had this happen. But ED kicked my drone something fierce

(well, it's still very good, but you know ....)

Speaking of brutes and EA. Did they have a better version of the def and resistance powers or something then? If not doesn't that more or less give the stalker better defense than the brute and better energy resistance than them too? I dunno, too late at night to even attempt to number crunch for me, it just looked weird to me when I looked over the notes.

[ QUOTE ]
Now that you have two half finished games how about we fill them out and make them as robust as most people would expect an MMO to be before we go and get carried away with the next City of....

[/ QUOTE ] You do realise that 'finished' and 'MMO' really go together very, very, very rarely. Actually, I'm completely unable to think of one.

Played a dark spec RM since the game came out myself. Very suprising how it went from being derided to being considered one of the better caster sets ... without the spell line ever really changing.

On the other hand, a very good friend of mine had a five spec shadowblade that he started back when they were going to get illusion spells. The memory of the nerfage still makes him cry.

Ok, so the revised numbers may be nice. It depends on how they scale and how early it starts. Lord knows that past the 20s the only amount of defiance I'll be wanting to see is whatever I'd get in the 50%-100% health range.

My problem is that, as far as the AT abilities go, it makes little sense for Blasters. I mean, really. Tankers get punch-voke, an aibility that enables them to gather more aggro. Scrappers get criticals that go off more often against higher 'ranked' mobs, helping them go up against bosses and the like. Controllers get that containment thing (or whever you call it) with the doubled damage on controlled mobs, I believe they also can critical hit with their controll effects, gaining extra magnitude (I could be wrong though). If both controller abilities are true, they gain better controll and the ability to solo (finally). Blasters get a (significant) boost to damage the closer they get to being defeated. This allows us to deal more damage, if we're not allready buffed by a team/inspirations/aim/build up, and are able to keep from being defeated in order to deal the damage without being healed.

So my question is, why is it that the rest of the ATs special abilities either don't require any special aciton on the ATs part (scrapper/tanker) or sync well with power the AT uses anyway (controller), while the blasters power requires them to take large amounts of damage ... something they historically don't do well.

As it stands Defiance is something most blasters (past 30 or so) would end up using as a random suprise when the enemy they're fighting manages to hurt them but not defeat them, not as something they'd plan for. It's just not something that meshes well with the AT. Why not just port over the blaster ability from PvP if you must give us something, lower the extra damage if you must, it'd fit better than defiance. Any number of things would. It's a nifty idea that went to the wrong AT.