Oliin

People did some unfortunate things to piggs and found it all. For a bit all the information for sorcery as well as several other potential future powersets were available on the wiki. Getting information that way's against the EULA though so that information's since been taken down.

So I don't really know how much of a boost just straight-out giving blasters a flat mez protection would be, but I think calling what they can do under defiance 2.0 'slinging pain all the time' is a bit of a stretch. It's the two weakest single target powers from the primary and the first power from the secondary which doesn't do damage for all the sets. While that's better than nothing at all it's also hardly a massive outpouring of damage comparatively.

First I'd like to correct myself. I forgot to turn off the whole accounting for crits in mid's damage calculations. So snipes seem to do 30 damage more than other 12 second recharge attacks. My bad.

That aside, I'm really not comparing apples to oranges. Damage in this game seems largely based off of a power's recharge (for attack powers anyway). Seriously, look at it in mids sometimes you have most 4 second recharge single-target powers all doing 62.56 damage (Single Shot, Dark Blast, Pistols, Charged Bolts, Power Bolt, Beheader, Slash, Lunge ... you get the idea), 6 second attacks do 82.58, 8 second ones do 102.6. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more to the calculation than just recharge, but it certainly seems to play a decently large role in the thing.

I was more sort of agreeing with the sentiment than trying to convince you otherwise with that.

I'm really skeptical about their doing much extra damage at all. As far as I'm aware most powers do damage based on their recharge, and if you compare the snipe's damage to some of the other 12 second recharge attacks they really don't measure up very well at all given their drawbacks.

Just looking over mids quickly there's only about a 10 point damage difference (fully slotted) between snipes and scrapper attacks like Eagle's Claw, and Golden Dragonfly (and a 10 point difference between Greater Fire Sword and Blazing Bolt). So for that extra range and 10 points of damage the power gets almost double the animation time and extra end cost.

Snipes in this game are just not all that great which is why they do really need something like extra damage, removed/shortened interrupt time, or even some new mechanics.

You do realize that they're planning on cycling back around to old costume sets right? It's not a case of if you miss it once it's gone forever. If they somehow ever drop that plan and don't make old sets purchasable somehow I'll be right along with anyone complaining about it even though I'll already have those costume pieces.

Also, I have a hard time calling 6+ months 'soon'. That's just me though and it's admittedly not nearly long enough to get to T9 just from subscription time alone (for someone who's only T4 or so).

Vet reward systems aren't designed to 'screw over people', and that's really all the Paragon Rewards system is in spite of its being altered so non-subscribers can get benefits out of it. You may not like vet reward systems, and judging by your comments I'm guessing you don't, but they're not out to 'get' you in any way. They're there to reward people who support a company.

In any case if you honestly like this 'relic' of a game, and judging by your expressed willingness to spend reasonable amounts of money on it you do to at least some extent, is it really such a terrible, horrible thing that you won't get immediate access to one costume set that you want?


As an aside ... Futurias I don't know that I'd ever call three years 'fast'.

You know the plan is to cycle the rewards back around right? So if you just continued to play as normal you'd eventually have enough tokens to get the thing and it'd eventually come back around for you to pick up.

Alternately, if you absolutely need it now and have the $200 to spend to get yourself up to T9 you'd not only have enough points to last you for a good long while, but you wouldn't need to spend that extra to get the points. Well, not if you were planning on being VIP over the summer already anyway. You'd have those 3 tokens by the end of it and there's almost zero chance of the set not being available by then (we've had the celestial set for over half a year already).


There's actually been a couple of times where I've put a token in so I could summon a tank or damage dealer. One time in particular was annoying. I was trying to fight Noble Savage with a plant/storm controller ... I spent a good 15 minutes trying to kill the guy to no avail.

Honestly, they all kind of remind me of Virtual On, but then I never really watched Gundam as much as I played that game.

Really? I actually kind of like it. Strikes me as having a 'contained power' sort of feel to it; though it strikes me as a little familiar but I'm not sure where I've seen something similar to it before.

The whole idea behind the T9 VIP reward tier is that you need to be a VIP to put your slots there.

Also, I saw the set briefly when it was posted on the boards the other day, but those pictures still look pretty dang awesome.

I'm really hoping they implement some changes for the hybrid slot since otherwise hybrid won't do anything to alleviate the usefulness of clarion for a ranged blaster.

I think pretty much the only tree even vaguely worth investing in for my energy/dev blaster is assault.

Not completely true. There's been complaints of overlap and toe-stepping between blasters and scrappers since the game came out (more or less). I may be recalling somewhat incorrectly, but wasn't one of the reasons Scrappers got crits in the first place because there was the mindset of why invite a scrapper when there's a blaster looking for a team too? It's pretty much continued to some degree or another since then really.

I mean they were both more or less just 'damage' as their team roles so it was bound to happen.

I'm not really trying to say you made a mistake or anything, just that is you're remotely patient the set is very safe once you get trip-mines (also very boring if you do lay mine-fields without the right temperament).

If you really want to play a 'hard mode' character try limiting your intended playstyle. Like make a range-only psi/em, or melee only rad/elec ... or honestly just keep on playing the psi/dev and don't do the whole mine field thing (or stealth most of your missions). As wonky as the blaster secondaries are they do all seem to have their effective niche, though some of them may be small.

Then it's possible that /devices wasn't the best choice for a secondary. Say what you will about the set, and lord knows I've complained about parts of it, but it's an incredibly safe powerset to use if you play to its strengths.

Sure it doesn't have a lot of use in a team setting, and laying down mine patches with caltrops fields can feel very tedious, but it's like playing the original version of a stalker who's assassin's strike does AoE damage. That's also kind of why I really wish the recent AS changes could somehow be carried over to Trip Mine and Time Bomb to give them some use when in-combat; those powers are even more useless than AS was when you're in a fight.

To be honest, as long as I got to hit things with a stick while looking even vaguely like some of those kung fu demonstration forms I was going to be happy.

I eagerly await the people bitterly complaining about how they totally deserve more than the 1.667 paragon points they were credited for the hour of game-time they lost.

Well, they were talking about 'average' blasters and I think you've established your blaster falls outside the range of 'average'.

That said, that's not a very good argument they presented. The two ranged single target attacks huntsmen get are out-damaged by the T1 and T2 blaster single target attacks of similar recharge and the other two attacks they're talking about are their melee ones. So they're basically saying they can out single-target damage most blasters with their four attacks as long as the blaster only uses their 3 (on average) single target ranged attacks that tend to do less damage than their melee attacks.

The point was that many blasters get a large amount of their single-target damage from melee attacks in their secondary as opposed to just from range(I hope anyway), but it really could have been worded much better.

So you're saying you would prefer that they actively design things to have power creep then?

I thought they already tried that once before?

...

All joking aside, if Lockout's actually Die Hard or Escape from New York in space I think I might actually go see it. I was wondering what movie to watch this weekend too.

So, I probably would have seen this solely on the strength of writer/director Rian Johnson's previous two films Brick (Starring Jason Gordon-Levitt) and The Brothers Bloom (cameoing Jason Gordon-Levitt) since I very much liked the both of them. That said, the tailer looks pretty spiffy.

Honestly I'd be fairly happy if more sets had both visually simple and over the top animations; where applicable anyway. Give dual pistols a more realistic style and at the same time give a set like broadsword animations inspired by a kung-fu sword form or something equally flashy.

It's mentioned specifically in the header text for the stalker powers:

If only it were true that words were simple I think the world might be a better place. Words are not always clear. They're fuzzy have multiple different dictionary definitions and often mean different things based on context.

Broken, for example, can also mean something that's simply not functioning as intended; not necessarily something that's not functioning at all.

Also, I don't really have any opinion about PvP before the attempted 'fix' other than that I didn't find it fun like I had in other games. However, an attempted fix that fails and makes things worse isn't exactly indicative of something not needing to be fixed in the first place.