PleaseRecycle
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Posts
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Quote:That has to be just about the creepiest thing that can occur in the game. I've stopped using smileys for anything but defusing severe misunderstandings because some people seem to take even that as "must be a woman: harassment mode engaged."Originally Posted by MisterMagpie
Wait, based on my last post. Advice to players: Please don't hit on/try to cyber with your teammates just because they are (or you think they are) women. Because no.
It's not actually a problem I've had with roleplayers, who only ever sent me 'Do you ERP?' requests and then left me alone. I'm talking non-rper dudebros straight instant trying to talk 'sexy' too me, hitting on me, and in one case sending me pictures of their genitalia. All because they seemed to think that's acceptable to do to someone who appears to be a woman.
Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion that those who do that sort of thing are neither aware of nor concerned about anyone's opinion of their behavior. -
Sure you have. What's your estimate on the release date of whip fighting?
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Zorro is the first example anyone has brought up that I find convincing, but isn't he more of a rapier man? The whip would be more like one of his secondary powers.
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Quote:See now this can be improved upon. I guess it depends on your inspiration proclivities but I find that between inner inspiration and drops I have a hard time using enough lucks to not have my /ah constantly filling up with spare phenoms. What I always have room for, though, is one column of non-lucks including three inspiration slots to be used as they are filled and one big wakie to be dispensed to a needy teammate as necessary. Unthinkably, sometimes I use it myself. Not very often of course, maybe once every twenty years or so.Originally Posted by Nihilii
Being myself tends to involve moving forward, having half of the team follow me and the rest screaming "wait! we're not ready" and everyone but me die as a result. Then they ask if I have wakies, but I don't 'cause I'm converting everything into lucks.
I used to be more of the antisocial scrapper type but now the metagame for me is amusing my teammates. It isn't much fun to play with people who are angry. -
As a point of comparison, guarded spin is basically like defensive sweep if it only existed in momentum-enabled form. It costs more endurance and covers less area but its size is still huge, its cost is still low and it is a very dependable cone with no strings attached. This is a microcosm of why I value staff as highly as I do. You don't have to use any particular form to run the aoe chain, for instance. Neither must you add any filler attacks to have the maximum amount of control in your single target chain.
I feel like I can now see where our fundamental disagreement lies and I don't think it's going to change. If you require a certain baseline single target DPS and staff doesn't clear that hurdle, what can be said? For me that doesn't matter because I can still kill bosses in a few attacks in practice through the combination of good slotting, purple procs, debuff procs and soon musculature and interface. If this chief soldier dies in four attacks, does it matter that three might have sufficed for .87 less arcanatime on a titan weapons character? I suspect you can guess my answer to that. Particularly since the waters become severely muddy when discussing aoe, as we have seen in terrific depth.
What concerns me is that the staff fighter can charge into a spawn with no care whatever for what she was doing a millisecond ago and begin ripping into it with whatever power is most appropriate for that instant. That is a damn sight different from typical sets where "waiting" is a thing that exists. I don't like waiting and I do like staff fighting. -
I apologize for that insult, Combat, it was crappy of me to be a jerk for no reason. Now I shall resume my complete opposition to your perspective, but more civilly.
Quote:I took you at your word that you don't have a SS/FA/Mu but since you kept bringing it up I felt completely justified in doing the same.Here's a few reasons to use single target attacks (and BTW, I love the continued assumption that I have a SS/FA/Mu, which I can only assume is being used as an attack because I have stated numerous times that I've never played that combo):
Every single AV or EB in the game, generally at least one per mission in team content and every few missions in solo content.
Defeating one or two bosses too widely spaced for AoEs
Defeating one target quickly to stop them from using dangerous abilities (eg, Tarantula Mistresses, Sappers, Nullifiers, DE Eminators and Spawners, Vanguard Wizards, Carnie Mistresses, etc.)
Defeating a single target in order to reduce damage taken
And more
And while SS/FA/Mu is fun to pick on because it has no cones, most sets tend to have at least one 5 target cone. The sets that don't are primarily tanker legacy sets like Ice, Energy, and Stone, along with MA. So your 'advantage' isn't unique to staff in the slightest.
To sum up my objections to all that stuff I quoted there, I don't believe that you put very much effort into your staff fighting stalker if you don't think it could have done those things. The great thing about staff's single target is that that's where most of its control lives: it gets a guaranteed mag 3 stun which it can easily if not reliably stack with precise strike's on bosses, it gets giant amounts of knockdown and it gets range with one of its best attacks which in practice is extremely significant pretty frequently.
By contrast, its aoe powers are at once more defensive yet less reliable. Guarded spin is a no-brainer when you're in a pinch, but innocuous strikes' immobilize is very subtle in its utility and eye's knockdown and debuffs are variant and not guaranteed. I find that this creates a truly excellent balance of outright power and necessary consideration on the player's end. There are times in aoe situations where I use single target attacks because it would be safer and vice versa. No other set has that. I was going to make that sentence longer but it's true how it is.
Regardless, this is no longer theoretical for me. My staff/elec scrapper is now 50, decked out, and capable of tanking ITFs with zero DDR and 35% s/l defense. That is far and away the least favorable high end situation for that combination. On STFs and LGTFs it might as well be invincible to go along with its spawn-shredding facility. You can say whatever you want about staff in theory but staff in practice gives titan weapons a run for its money and it isn't even supposed to. -
I'm simply trying to say that this is not a high priority concept for the devs to work on. Does the universe hinge on me demonstrating that in this thread? It does not. I was bored and I see no reason not to add some legitimate feedback to a thread suggesting a new feature.
In fact, if you guys wanted a better suggestion, how about a nunchucks power set? Those actually are historical weapons and are pretty cool to boot. I doubt they'd get cracking on them too quickly after staff fighting for fear of being considered turtle coddlers, but... -
All of the references on that chain whip wikipedia page are youtube links apart from a single book written in 1996.
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It'd be more like me asking for a shock collar melee set. Shock collars hurt, right? People use them all the time. Dogs don't mess with you once you've shocked them good! Do you think that would be a reasonable request?
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Funny then that the history I've read indicates in big bold letters that whips are animal control and sometimes torture devices. That's not the same as a weapon, and I can find zero examples of anyone in history fighting people in earnest using whips with cursory googling. In fact, to the contrary I find that any whip combat technique is incredibly recent and basically fabricated by nerds who like Indiana Jones. I hate to be the one to tell you this but that isn't going to cut it for a powerset that would cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop and needs to recoup that cost in some way.
Also that was a lie, I don't hate that. -
I guess I get to be the one to point out that whips aren't even weapons. There is nothing resembling real world basis for "whip fighting." The only reason they work to the extent that they do for demon summoning is that they're entirely particle effects that can be as long as necessary to imply some sort of magical harmfulness. Frankly I think they look pretty terrible, no offense to whoever worked on them, just because the animations carry no weight at all since they're based on the false premise that some little piece of leather is going to do more than give you a carpet burn.
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Today I got my staff/elec scrapper to 50 and got all my purples slotted. So begins the long road to incarnatehood! In any case, having done that I feel a little more qualified to say without reservation that it is one of my favorite sets for any AT. What I think some people who dislike it have been missing is that it doesn't have just one or two special tricks to be considered in isolation, it has a whole raft of them that can be taken advantage of in a variety of ways. It's the first application of the stance switching system where you'd actually want to ever switch from "the best one," too.
Rather than being down on its single target performance it would be useful to note that it basically scales its damage capacity to however many targets happen to be present. Even against one target it's quite nice but a whole aggro cap's worth of bosses isn't too much of a speed bump. The fact that you can be potentially proccing fury of the gladiator onto five more targets every two seconds while also continuing to hit all of the targets affected by the debuff with most of your attacks isn't something other sets can compete with. I don't even have interface yet but that's going to be huge for staff.
After my recent flings with street justice and titan weapons I was starting to wonder if maybe I just didn't like melee that much anymore. Leave it to staff to set me straight. That wasn't suggestive at all. -
If your praise is capable of retaining any amount of water at all beyond what the local geography dictates I would call it some of the least faint that I have ever heard of.
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Quote:Character concept: The Flash Bomber. Horrifying. Especially since this game doesn't have any closed trench coats.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
It doesn't take much accuracy to lob a grenade in your general direction. You can do that without ever exposing yourself.
It's worth noting, though, that SR scrappers have from the beginning been able to dodge explosions with some regularity. How do they do it? I don't know. Who's to say that blasters couldn't get in on that action? -
If you preclude purples that makes this a lot easier: staff is awesome if you want to build for typed defense. Specifically, using eradications and kinetic combats you can go big on s/l/e/n, the only types other than psi that tend to matter very much. Staff/fire in particular can slot five sets of KC and five sets of eradication easily, which should put you awfully close to the softcap depending on your other slotting choices. Other than that my advice is I suspect rather standard. You definitely want tough and weave, part of the beauty of staff is that form of the soul lets you go nuts with toggles. You probably don't need pyre mastery unless you're really married to the concept as staff is also huge on aoe and you get burn on top of that.
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You don't actually need to go /psi, drain psyche is great but electric control all by itself will drain virtually anything in short order. Blasters and defenders pale in comparison to controllers and doms if your top priority is sapping.
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I recommend a staff scrapper! You get a ranged attack and everything. It's transformative.
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I wish they'd have a ten minute bio armor character creation preview before issue 23 so I could make a claws/bio on vigilance before they strip out the french character info. A concept that I suppose was not meant to be.
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Quote:It shouldn't take a giant amount of reflection to see why this is wrong. In general the more granular the damage you can do, the better. Bigger chunks more often lead to overkill. As Claws said there's also the fact that while you're beating on the boss, the aura is killing everything else. There remains the fact that the aura costs what a single target attack would cost so anything it hits past the first target is pure gravy. If you're somehow not yet swayed, take note of how many farmers choose non-aura sets.Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
This. If you have something that does a point of damage to every mob you ever fight over the course of the game, it's inevitable that it's all going to add up to a lot of damage. However, how often does that damage actually contribute to the DEFEAT of the mob? Chances are that a mob that goes down in three hits will go down in three hits with or without the damage done by the aura.
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Quote:Damage auras enable you to pay single target endurance to do ten target aoe damage for zero animation time. "Huge" is an understatement if anything.Originally Posted by Leo_G
*shrugs* I've read this many of times but tend to ask just how much that damage actually matters. Like I said, if the foe does quickly, in a few hits, just how much damage goes off before the enemy is dead? Getting off a tier 1's amount of damage in the time it takes to defeat the foe *IF* they stay in range is considered 'huge'?
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Quote:Well it's better than WP's taunt aura and you yourself recommended TW/WP in this very thread sooooo...Originally Posted by DreadShinobi
From what I've heard from the only friend I know that plays an EA scrapper, the taunt aura in Entropic Aura is pitiful.
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As far as I know nobody has yet done an analysis of the impact of the scrapper's strike proc. When catalyzed it's a 6% bonus critical chance to all of your attacks. I haven't even bothered with a back-of-an-envelope calculation of that as compared to the fury proc because it seems so bleedingly obviously superior in all cases.
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It's a great set. Too great by most standards, though it pairs best with sets that help your endurance since it pays for its damage in that way. None of the archetypes with access to it suffer in any unique way with TW so you might as well play the one you prefer.
I don't like titan weapons. Beyond the fact that it's too good, the momentum mechanic is annoying and the animations are certainly punchy but they just seem incongruous to the rest of the game to me. If constantly worrying about misses breaking up your flow doesn't bother you you'll probably have no problem with it whatsoever. For me, finishing a spawn was always a little painful because I'd see a few seconds of momentum go to waste and know that for the next spawn it was back to slow-feeling animations for at least the first attack. The funny part is that the set isn't even all that slow out of momentum, they just did a great job of making it feel terrifically ponderous. -
Dark melee is great but for a budget build you might want to consider kinetic melee. It gets pretty comparable single target performance with much less recharge required and it looks pretty good doing it. For my money it's also more fun to play when you're not soloing AVs than DM. With dark I often feel outclassed in team environments due to the single target focus and burst helps keep KM from having the same issue.
Shield would be an excellent secondary for this purpose as well. With KM/Shield all you really have to focus on is regular softcapping the positions and that isn't too great a challenge these days. The notable gap in KM/Shield that DM/Shield does not have is of course siphon life, but there are a couple ways to make that up. Aid self is functional and everything but rebirth is really where it's at if you ask me. Sure, it only exemps down to 45, but most people don't seem to exemplar to fight AVs. -
The fact that the incarnate softcap is the new standard forced me to plan a better staff/elec build than I suspect I would have in the past. I used to focus on the s/l softcap to the detriment of other types, but since that wouldn't even mean anything in particular anymore I'm going for ~34% s/l/e/n instead. As that's i-capped with medium or large purples I foresee a pretty hectic DA playstyle, but in a good way. Running on x8 might be safer than x5.