PleaseRecycle

I really like the ranged playstyle, but for me "the ranged playstyle" includes ranges anywhere from a hundred feet to zero. When you're permanently incarnate softcapped, why not dive in? The main plus in my mind is that then you only invest so much of your build's resources on your attacks. They may not be as strong as the melee powers but you can always use them.

It should be a pretty big improvement. My initial impulse was to say that it wouldn't be all that, but now that I think about it it usually does take me approximately the forty-five seconds of recharge that psychic wail will have in issue 24 to clean up the lieuts and bosses that are left after nuking or voiding a reasonably sized Dark Astoria spawn or what have you. Instead of coinciding with judgement's recharge it will now be about two wails per judgement; is it better to double-nuke every second spawn? A side effect of that would be accelerating its destruction, thereby throwing the whole thing out of whack. Or I could stagger them as I do now, wasting a little bit of wail recharge but hitting every spawn in the order of wail-wail-judgement-repeat. Not a bad problem to have, n'est-ce pas?

Well that was some rambling. I would say go fort but I would have said that in the first place. With greater investment fortunatas can pretty much do everything that widows can do plus a slew of other nifty tricks. Oh yeah, I solo on x6 rather than x8 since it feels less grindy to me.

A gloom-dominate-subdue ranged fort (with a nice build) can easily solo AVs. It's probably the lowest single target DPS of the typical VEAT build options but it's more than enough to beat AV regen. One nice thing about it is that it's all psionic and negative damage: good for some AVs, not so good for others, but decidedly different from most other AV soloists. When someone like Marauder hits unstoppable all you can do is grin.

It is a rather tedious AV soloing experience. Sure, you're going to win, but you'll probably be there for a while. Then again, I would say that of AV soloing in general. If you're already an enthusiast you know what you're getting into.

That angle of attack just makes me wonder which set should be last if not ice, EG. But anyway, we've been down that road before.

It might be relevant to consider that even after the not-so-recent-now-that-I-think-about-it adjustments, ice melee is still one of the worst melee sets by pretty much any measurement of damage. Maybe a producer was once accosted by an ice cube and has had it in for the substance ever since?

How come I never got official dev response to my "Whirlwind or group fly, pick one or else!" thread?

It's odd that you say that because the fact that I have to pay for powersets doesn't make me feel like a VIP either: it makes me feel like a PIGS! Person of Inter-Galactic Significance, that is! With a mere several mouse clicks, the forces of nature come together at my fingertips, bending to my every whim! An electrical signal is sent from my mighty brain through my highly evolved nervous system down to my stately digit, crushing the unsuspecting button into submission. In its understandable urgency to kowtow to my designs, it then relays a signal through a series of tubes, in real time. At the local pumping station, NCSoft collects my pronouncement and from it gathers that my unflinching wisdom and unstoppable potency have come together to make them an offer that they are powerless to refuse: "Give me your power sets," they imagine me intoning, "and nobody gets hurt and you get ten dollars." Hurriedly they uphold their end of the bargain, knowing full well the consequences of dalliance. Behold: I have gained the ability to hit a robot with a stick without the merest exertion of my callipygian form.

Now would somebody PL me plz?

Ah, well credit where it is due then, nice job Viridian! This just goes to show that everyone at Paragon loves villains and hates heroes.

New skulls? I'm for 'em!

I strongly feel, and have always felt, that they should add a "water" bar below your endurance. The more water you have the less thirsty you are, etc. With the introduction of water blast it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness. The ironically-named dehydrate power is just one more way in which the devs are slapping us in the face.

I'd forgotten that these existed until I saw this thread, so I just ran all three parts in villain and then hero form. Turns out they're really good, so thanks for the tip!

It must be said that yes, once again, villains get to be way more proactive and end up seeing more story. It isn't even close to as uneven as it was in Who Will Die, however, so there's progress. Further, while heroes may not get the full scoop on the shenanigans in progress they do at least get a bunch of detail about the Freedom Phalanx that villains avoid entirely. Still, creating your own evil bureaucracy versus getting buttered up repeatedly by Positron... I think McCann has a roguish bent, perhaps.

The writing quality continues its upward trajectory on the whole. Maybe it's just me but so far Pandora's Box has been more unpredictable than past content. The moments of downtime with optional dialogue are refreshing and the cutscenes are well-placed and interesting. The constant positive feedback about your character's amazingness seems a little more reserved than it was in Who Will Die as well. My principal complaint is that it still has a few moments where you trigger an ambush as well as a giant block of plot-important text at the same time; nobody likes clues, but maybe that would be a better place to put the contents of "important dossiers" and such?

Tohit is an attribute that you have as a character. Accuracy is per-power, though confusingly you can also get it in the form of global bonuses. The system is pretty opaque if you're trying to figure it out from in-game information alone, but here is a more detailed analysis.

City of Heroes skill, in my view, is just as much about your goals as your results. I don't find it to be terribly challenging to ensure that things go smoothly. Foolproof strategies for that, such as letting the tank herd, have become punchlines. If you get a little crazy you may fall flat from time to time but the important thing is that you'll have learned something. If you're never seeing anything new, what's the point?

I don't usually tell someone they've impressed me with their general skillfulness, but I frequently appreciate the ambition of teammates. Sometimes you can just tell that someone is fidgeting around as they are because they're working out whether their cone will hit both of the bosses in the spawn and if not, what then?

How about when the team rounds a corner and suddenly everyone just stops. It's worse than we expected. Are we all going to die? Nobody knows. After a pregnant pause people begin doing what they do best. Someone hits build up, one of the spawns starts glowing from the impending wormhole, the meleers descend like a thin swarm of thick locusts, the smell of debuffs fills the air and what seems like an hour but was actually thirty seconds later our heroes (or villains) have emerged victorious without a word said between them. Nobody mention that we tried the same thing last mission and had to repair the blaster with duct tape!

That's the kind of skill that I like to see, and fortunately the kind that I do see all the time.

As long as you pick a set that mainly relies on ally buffs, in keeping with the thread title, shouldn't basically any set work rather easily? My thinking is thus: take the second computer's keyboard and put it to the left of your main keyboard. Bind any buffs or easily-targeted-through-your-primary-hero debuffs or attacks or what have you to the second keyboard's numpad. That's about it, hit them as needed. Your APM will be through the roof and MLG will be in touch with lucrative broadcasting contracts within the week.

Well I'm convinced. What's the deal, Claws? I thought you knew about them figurifications and calculatronics!

Pssst, he said tactics!

Not that martial combat doesn't look like a great set which would work just fine with beam rifle, but it strikes me as one I'd want to pair with a primary that enjoyed mixing it up at closer range. Even disregarding the melee attacks, you've got your pbaoe teleport, you've got your slow aura, the short range cone disable... I'm thinking that'll be more fitting with water blast, for example.

To exacerbate the derail, I know what you mean about fly. Have you set up binds for it? They don't do anything for the physics but they can make using it in a pinch much less difficult. I've got fly on my first thumb button, afterburner on my second thumb button and hover on C. Now I just need to grow an extra finger to hit a ninja run toggle and it'll be sorted. It certainly beats my old technique of trying to click on the powers in the tray when I wanted to move because something started shooting at me!

Actually my beam/dev is my first flying-and-not-combat jumping character in probably at least six years. It's hard to keep track at this point. Beyond cloaking device/field operative just being a good sustain power, the reason I like it with beam is that beam is good at long range, right? Know what else is good at range? Ranged defense! Know what goes well with ranged defense? Regen! Especially since hover and fly don't detoggle under mez, just in getting the blaster to the mid-20s in preparation for the update I've found it to be a surprisingly fun combination.

It's almost like it is already good without issue 24's updates. That is pretty hard to believe though because it would imply that blasters don't completely suck.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Back to your point, yeah, it isn't so much that I am fully appreciating all that devices has to offer, it's more that the highlights of devices beautifully compliment beam rifle. I was about to get into my feelings on why beam rifle will be particularly intriguing in issue 24 but I obviously tend to get long-winded and this thread is already about beam rifle so there's no need for that.

Devices is nice because it pretty much doesn't have any in-combat redraw, it supports a long range playstyle and it is going to pair swimmingly with snipe sets. My issue 24 blaster is beam/devices for conceptual as well as gameplay purposes.

Energy is great, you can't really go wrong with it, but I'll differ with MisterD on the utility of boost range. Having used it extensively since launch, I now feel that in the vast majority of cases it is a white elephant for the set. You'd feel silly to skip such a unique and theoretically potent power but situations that take advantage of it are few and far between. When it is useful it still manages to annoy you by requiring constant recasting.

The two places where it strikes me as credibly powerful are street sweeping and fighting Hamidon. Against many regular enemies it allows you to smush them with impunity as long as you can be sure that you're more than 80 feet from the highest point they can reach on foot. Thing is, even now on live blasters don't really need to be that scared of most enemies. We're talking issue 24 here, it's going to be a lot harder to be killed by a boss and a couple minions. I'd say the same of Hamidon: why not just kill a blue from normal range? If you're sniping away from 300 feet you're also not receiving any team buffs or anything like that.

So, with too many words said about boost range, what does energy still give you? Build up, power boost, energize and a couple nice melee attacks. I think beam rifle in issue 24 pretty much speaks for itself and thus benefits more from a set's buffs than from any supplemental attacks. As such you can stack those up to field operative, targeting drone, caltrops, and maybe some of the other stuff appeals to you more than it does to me.

my favorite content is the death from bellow because it makes you get the level and then you win

The only cloaking going on around here is the cloaking of fairness and justice for /devices blasters. Once a proud people, Synapse's boot heel now presses down on our throats as he madly cackles into the night. A torch is lit in remembrance, but who will be there to see it? Only the shadows of those who once dwelled in this hallowed place. For shame, Paragon Studios, for shame.

This thread went dramatically differently from how I expected "Scrapper vs Brutes" with ~50 posts to have gone sight unseen. The winner is clearly brutes because they don't need to know any math.