PleaseRecycle

If they're going to be for sale in the store it won't be today. I checked before the maintenance began and the new items were the cosmetic disc power and the vast array of "eh" rare sets.

The "new style" of CoH story is what I assumed the game was going to be like before release and what I subsequently figured they'd be adding as soon as they had time to work on non-filler content. Wouldn't you know it, I was right! I just didn't expect it to take them years to get to it. To be more fair, the Hollows was definitely an early attempt to engage you with the environment you're in and to give the so called story arcs an actual arc to them. You start out by meeting a rather hapless cop and by the end, in theory, you're rescuing his kid from mystical forces.

The hollows failed as a storyline not because of bad writing or a lack of ambition, rather simply because the game wasn't up to the task back then. The zone was horrendous to navigate, aggravated by the fact that every spawn was vast and sprawling and missions had you criss-cross the zone. I don't remember if the ability to call contacts even existed in issue 2. What barely existed was exemplaring: if the stars didn't align for your pick up team, or if your seven friends didn't coordinate their leveling precisely, good luck running that trial. You know, the one that supposedly ties together the plot threads of the zone, only unless you're the team leader and you take the time to read everything on a hard-as-hell-at-the-time trial with an uncomfortable time limit you won't see a single word of exposition. Even if you did do that it was unsatisfactory simply because the tech didn't exist at that point to have exposition occur during missions except via clues, which trials never had.

Imagine how frustrating mission design must have been for the game's first writers. They certainly didn't lack big ideas, yet leader-only text dumps were their one and only means of expression. Praetoria, tips, faultline and so on are better because their designers had the wherewithal to make them better. Legacy content was hobbled by default.

It seems to me that they'd have loved to have had at least a couple contacts per zone that dealt with that zone's character. You can almost see it in a couple of the Kings Row contacts, but that may as well be coincidence: Kings Row's character is out of control gang violence, and its arcs simply had nowhere else to send you trotting off to (apart from Galaxy City, and Perez Park... the horror, the horror.). One look around Brickstown should be all the proof one needs that something big was supposed to happen with that prison, for instance, but they were never able to make it work. Actually when I put it that way I recall that the prison was indeed meant to be the site of a trial, as was the mystery geometry BEYOOOOND THE DAAAAAM in Faultline. Odd that it took them seventeen issues to add the next trial that they were to add, heh.

One critique: C&E is off the mark about one thing: Storm kick is the (mechanical) reason to use martial arts in the first place. It is a phenomenal attack. It should be the centerpiece of your chain regardless of your global recharge level. I strongly suggest using scrapper's strike in that rather than eagle's claw if you can't put hecatomb in storm kick instead. Another option to consider would be going three and three, by which I mean three scrapper's strike in storm kick and three in eagle's claw, perhaps. That way both of the powers benefit from the purple enhancement values at 50, you get a staggering 10% s/l defense out of the deal which goes nicely with the 6% hp you also get, and all you give up is a single ultimate recharge bonus.

If you don't want to worry about that, six pieces in one attack is totally fine, but please make sure that that attack is storm kick! You won't regret it.

I'm not exactly a stalker expert but it seems to me that all of the more recently added sets are just better than the old ones. KM, SJ, and soon Staff sacrifice very little in exchange for AS and placate. Even elec, which is not that recent, at least gives stalkers good aoe and some unique tricks, i.e. lightning rod not breaking hide. Compare those to MA, EM and Claws... yikes. No contest, I dare say.

It seems like the remaining hurdle for stalkers would be fixing the legacy primaries that were designed to suck back in the day. Sets with no aoe or aoe that once existed but was nerfed into single targethood should be given a once-over and a rare exemption from the cottage rule. Still, as long as you don't use a set that sucks you should be golden as of tuesday.

Castle said that the reason he didn't want to look at spines again was for the sake of spines. As a demonstration of why, construct a single target chain for spines. Then add the dps from quills. Then consider that quills is not just hitting one target, and quills and your other attacks don't just do damage. I can't bring myself to play spines either but that's down to aesthetic considerations. Trying to bring spines into line in single target terms would not have happy consequences for spines' aoe capabilities.

Nova fist's effect probably varies wildly depending on your video settings, that expanding blast you mention is I believe entirely composed of smoke-looking particles.

My currently-played fortunata is the main reason why I'm not sure why you guys think a psi judgement would be lower damage than normal. If psi is universally low damage, my fort missed the memo! Blaster psi blast is crap but that seems like an isolated incident. There's the toxic and psi interface powers, yet those have additional effects on top of the damage. Confuse, I can see why they thought that would be strong enough to merit slightly reduced proc damage. -HP, uhhh... the devs aren't perfect. In any case, there doesn't seem to be any current general rule that says psi has to suck. I expect psi judgement would do the same damage as the rest and its radial benefit would be a large -rech bonus.

Well, part of it is that she's a boss and bosses have a much better damage AT mod than players get. Her claw attacks also hit like a train even though their animations indicate they'd be tier 1 and tier 2 powers most likely.

However, as to a psychic judgement, I think Void works pretty well in the absence of a real one. Color it pink, dazzle your foes into submission!

This has made me realize that I have no idea how the timing works when you have two damage auras. Do they proc at the same time, based on some kind of server timer? Do their proc chances line up to their activation times, i.e. staggered when you first turn them on but thereafter coinciding once you've zoned once? The reason I wonder is because if each aura's proc chance were staggered then you would, I suspect, get much better results out of the debuff. You'd have two distinct chances every ten seconds, rather than one extra-large chance every ten seconds, for it to apply. This would make it more likely for any arbitrary alpha spawn-dive to contain a proc chance. I must say that I suspect that the auras proc at the same time most of the time for whatever underlying reason, and if that is accurate then that diminishes the proc's reliability of occurrence at any specific moment.

Also unclear: does degenerative reduce max HP by a fixed amount? Surely they wouldn't let you debuff that stat by a percentage. Further, is it affected by the purple patch? Given that things tend to be even when the devs don't want them to be, I would guess that the answer is yes. All of this is adding up to reinforce my suspicion that the damage is better than the debuff.

I get it! Why they're waiting until next week to deploy the issue, that is.

"Super tuesday!"

Ha ha harrrrgh

I haven't actually used degenerative, so there's that straight out the window, but here's the conceptual problem I have with it: regardless of the magnitude of its -hp, it cannot possibly be useful unless it reduces the number of attacks that it takes to defeat a foe. The case of minions puts the problem in clear focus: you need to hit them with an attack in the first place to apply the debuff. This is an issue because as a scrapper I tend to want minions to die in two hits, tops. For that debuff to have any effect you must already be a sliver away from beating minions in your desired number of hits. If that is the case however, another problem arises: You know what tends to foreshorten defeat times better than debuffs? Powerful damage over time effects! If you do want to go degenerative, why not just go for tier 3 radial much as one would do with reactive?

With spines/fire in particular this all gets super muddy, though. That is, measuring the effectiveness of something like a -hp effect when you're already throwing around two damage auras, a pbaoe with a chance for additional damage, a low target high damage pbaoe damage patch, two cones that can do bonus damage... Who knows how many attacks it's taking you to defeat minions? Who knows which effect contributed to which minion's defeat? All we can say is that when you stand next to dudes they tend to fall over. In the spirit of that I reiterate my support for pursuing the damage proc as opposed to the debuff. It lets you make more overhead numbers and the more of those you make, the harder it is for your teammates to tell what's going on.

I've been playing this game for over thirty years and frankly you are a damned idiot if you don't run QP/SL. It has the most DFA, it has the best ETD, and you won't find a single Quorn rancher on freedom running any other combination. You want proof? Bam. I pity anyone who runs PU/MT or, god forbid, WN/TL. Have fun at the yearly nursing home clambake, you relic.

Edit: by the way, here's the only good build:

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|her!) I was shift and shuft too, with her shester Mrs Shunders,|
|both mudical dauctors from highschoolhorse and aslyke as|
|Easther's leggs. She was the niceliest person of a wellteached non-|
|party woman that I ever acquired her letters, only too fat, used|
|to babies and tottydean verbish this is her entertermentdags for|
|she shuk the bottle and tuk the medascene all times a day. She|
|was well under ninety, poor late Mrs, and had tastes of the poetics,|
|me having stood the pilgarlick a fresh at sea when the moon also|
|was standing in a corner of sweet Standerson my ski. P.L.M|
|Mevrouw von Andersen was her whogave me a muttonbrooch,|
|stakkers for her begfirst party. Honour thy farmer and my litters.|
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Catalysts are specific to ATOs. Basically they take their enhancement modifier from that of normal sets to that of purple sets. You can't use them on inventions at all.

What you can do is use enhancement boosters. Those have the same effect but on inventions; a level 50 uncommon or rare invention boosted to +5 has purple values. A purple invention boosted to +5 has values that are unspeakable and sexy.

Not only is scrapper damage potential higher, the ATOs widen the gap. Average brute performance is improved a great deal, yet nothing can help a brute that is already damage capped. Now scrappers have a larger crit window than ever. So yes, scrappers definitively have a performance advantage. The annoying part is that brute boosters, or brewsters as I like to call them, tend to selectively ignore that because they're so high on life due to their sheer bruteyness. I admire the enthusiasm, it's great that you love brutes, but they're not objectively better, they have certain pros and cons just as scrappers do. I personally have come to accept that Moonlighter, mauk2 and others simply prefer brutes but that's where this mini-conflict is coming from.

When someone says "two scrappers are always worse than two corruptors," that's directly comparable to someone saying "a brute is always better than a ____." No such generalization over the archetypes is ever true. I haven't duoed the LGTF with two scrappers to prove it to be false, but it should be plainly obvious that two scrappers can be constructed that can stack mag 16 status effects, fly, do ranged damage, and kill AVs rapidly with lore pets, same as any AT. That plus a little chutzpah are all you need to run a speed LGTF. I think it telling that the fastest teams are always mixed, however. It demonstrates that balance in CoH is not as bad as some people would like to think.

I think it's useful to consider not just this thread but parallel discussions of blasters and such. There, people really are saying "Well, brutes are great so what's the point of anything else?" Yes, scrappers have been somewhat encroached-upon as the go-to scapegoat of power. Note to self, check if "Scapegoat of Power" is taken on Virtue. Anyway, yes, some people really do argue that the only good ATs are corruptors and brutes and everything else is a total waste. That is demonstrated to be false every time a defender/mastermind combo does something cool against, apparently, all odds.

I used my MA/DA for it and while I had char, I pretty much left my partner hanging as far as stacking hold mag. Could easily have shaved a few minutes off mission 4 with builds specialized for the TF. That was an odd example on Kangstor's part since the LGTF is a superb example of an eminently speedable TF for a variety of combinations.

It probably has them confused with the tanker versions of the same. Look at it this way, though: that spawn you just knocked end over end with energy torrent will certainly have to give at least some thought to reprisal! I recommend using City of Data for your numerical needs, since they started updating again they're pretty definitive.