PleaseRecycle

It's okay dug, Warrant lives on a farm in the country now. He gets to eat as much steak as he wants.

I think we should put them on our feet and call them piedots.

Several weeks ago I made a claws/dark scrapper in anticipation of how freaking stupid the overwhelming force proc would be in shockwave. That day has come and it is indeed very stupid. I couldn't help but notice, though, that even before I got that proc the combination was pretty remarkable. I'm not sure how it looks for brutes since one of the great things about it is that in scrapper form your single target chain is, for the most part, operating under a 112.5% damage buff. If you run follow up-focus-slash then slash doesn't get the triple stack. You can also run follow up-spin-focus or follow up-shockwave-spin for aoe silliness. Long story short, everything dies except you. Added bonus: you'll never see anyone else playing the same combination.

Or will you?!?

Man, Zombie Man with another outside of the box suggestion. I don't think it goes far enough. How about every time an enemy is knocked down by bonfire or tornado their current HP and max HP are multiplied by 1.1?

You must not have seen the archery and DP farmer threads. There's plenty of video of it on youtube if you were curious. Worse than a brute? If you're able to keep yourself upright and the rabble supine, well, that's pretty much farming. Outside survivability concerns are irrelevant to the discussion.

THB, I agree with you that drain psyche is more rewarding the more you invest in the character, being only "pretty good" on SOs. Consider Paragon's options though: modify the power, necessitating a balance pass because now there are actually standards for this sort of thing, and infuriate the hardcore, or leave it alone and suffer some minor grumbling. None of the other secondaries are getting any kind of -regen so in that sense even on SOs mental manipulation is still plenty unique and desirable.

As Arbiter Hawk said, and as you seem to be grudgingly acknowledging even as you attempt to skirt around it, the overpowered part of drain psyche is the gigantic -regen. Of course it doesn't hurt that the buff portion of the power is practically tailor made for farming, either.

I'd prefer not to dump on a set because as you say there are always ways to mitigate any deficiencies, perceived or actual. Part of my SJ enmity came from the fact that I cycled through all of 50s on Virtue for the summer event today, including my SJ scrapper and brute. Both are only slightly purpled and are suboptimal set pairings compared to my subsequent characters, ergo they do not look particularly good in comparison.

What I cannot set aside is that I just don't like how the powers mesh. Four builders and three finishers, when there is no overlap between them, adds up to wasted recharge. You cannot use all four builders unless you're rocking a SO build that doesn't believe in recharge slotting, but that isn't terribly meaningful compared to the finisher issue. The real problem is that you can only build three combo points over a period of fourish seconds and to do so you can only be using the three builders that you selected. Those other finishers may be very nice looking but only the one you actually use to complete the cycle is of any use to you. The overlap is most apparent between sweeping cross and spinning strike, spinning strike being the sensible choice the vast majority of the time. As I said, the wrench in the works is the fact that sweeping cross has to double as a single target attack and crushing uppercut is not so good that it deserves the privileged status that it has of "only great single target power in the set."

As you can see I could go on about this but eeeeeeeegh. If you like how SJ looks and don't care about such minutiae, go nuts. There's nothing actually wrong with it. As a long-time veteran of martial arts scrappers, though, I cannot help but make that comparison and martial arts happens to win.

In my experience...

MA and SJ initially look similar but MA is basically just better. One aoe versus two? That's cool, dragon's tail is better than either of SJ's aoes and the thing is that given the combo system you can't actually fire both of your aoes as often as they're up without feeling like you're missing damage. Of course, if you got over that hurdle then SJ is in fact the better set for aoe by a margin I've not bothered to calculate.

Where SJ is not better is in single target. Storm kick is pretty much as good as crushing uppercut on its face. The difference is that storm kick can be every second attack, whereas crushing uppercut is lucky to be every sixth. Some may argue that street justice is the more satisfying single target set based on the big, crunchy animations but there isn't much of a case to be made for its numerical superiority.

For me the deal breaker is how finicky SJ's combos are. Unlike staff or water blast, the finishers are not also builders. When you miss a piece of your chain you just feel bad about it and there isn't anything you can do about it due to the way SJ's attacks' recharge times stack up in an obnoxious way that I am not prepared to explain but which you could figure out if you spent a lot of time on it. Was that just one sentence? Right, well, my point is that if you miss your shin breaker, either you fire your CU for sub-par damage and end your combo, you fire your sweeping cross for radically worse damage but allow for the possibility of starting a new chain for another chance at CU, or you just keep cycling builders.

It kind of sucks, honestly. SJ is a great stalker set because they have more single target punch and give up no aoe. For scrappers? I really wanted to like this set but I cannot recommend it, all told.

Crunch Rockbody!

All you need to do is go back in time a couple years to become one of my global friends and then around August 2011 start regaling me with tales of speed TFs at all hours. Sold! Seriously, someone please remember to do that or else the causality won't make any sense.

Very fun event. This is largely due to the fact that there isn't any faffing around, either through waiting for things to start happening or with Reichsman-like speed bumps. Having different roles to try out and loads of badges to shoot for is great as well. It feels like they crammed the same amount of content you'd get in one of the other seasonal events into twenty minutes, and it's all the better for it.

Almost any power that does 100% KB is utterly broken with the new proc. I hope they address it soon because the alternative is addressing it never, c.f. super strength.

Just in response to the last couple posts, if your TW chain includes whirling smash by necessity to be gapless, that is frankly insane in comparison with any other set. That attack is 14 EPS. If you're using that on a single target it's comparable to being hit with hasten's crash two or three times more often than usual even if you have Armageddon's dam/end quintuple-boosted in it compared to a more typical set's chain. Whew, that's a lot of unsupported comparisons. My point is that it is prima facie one of the most expensive powers you could possibly use in a single target chain as a scrapper. Most sets don't have a power that could possibly be as expensive as slotted whirling smash even if they left it completely unslotted for endurance.

I don't see what's wrong with Mek Majik. One of the year's major PC releases feels that you can get away with spelling mechanism "mekansm." Once you've uncorked the bottle of nonspecific fantasy, ani'ytheng iz pohsibbel.

To avoid the entire taunt aura can of worms and simply respond to the first post, do you have anything against breaking line of sight? That is basically a sure-fire cure for DA woes. My staff/elec found that very same Dream Doctor mission to be surprisingly brutal and my post-mortem opinion was that it was my own stupid fault for not immediately abandoning the pets. Their idiocy encouraged me to tackle more than one spawn at a time and when you're dealing with six or more various BP bosses it usually isn't going to go well. Well-timed retreat is a great antidote for that.

Even when you're alone, though, it works wonders against multi-sorrow spawns. As another poster suggested it can be easiest to start from the lieutenants and work up to the bosses, but as far as I'm aware none of us were ever forced to sign a contract to the effect that we'd be standing in the middle of the spawn for the entire fight. Kill a couple lieuts, find some cover so debuffs can wear off, take out a boss, find some more cover, finish the last ancient of sorrow and mop up the rest. It may not be the fastest method, but on the other hand it can indeed be faster than recovering from a death.

After a couple weeks of dereliction of punching I hopped back on CoH today. I was ready to complain about the process of earning these procs when I learned that the set is immune to conversion but fortunately the event is a lot of fun. Anyway, shockwave is exactly as broken as I had asserted it would be however many months ago that first KB to KD thread came up in the general forum. You can farm on +whatever x8 in Dark Astoria and there isn't a damn thing any of the enemies there can do about it because they are permanently controlled. The only thing that keeps it from being outright cheating is that shockwave can only hit ten targets, so you still sort of take an alpha from most spawns.

Is this the new standard for balance? I hope it isn't, but here we are.

You know, A_F, I wish I could say that the intensity of your nonconstructive complaining in this thread were in any way a surprise.

Cool changes. I was pretty sure my water blaster would be a corruptor, now I am less convinced.

You forgot the primal lab! Nay, the Technology Danger Lab! Minus Twenty Points!!!

Well yeah man, but even if you don't want to use tough it's better to take it than the other melee attack since if nothing else it's a good steadfast or glad armor mule.

Here's a brief rant, in fact. Now that they've shown they're willing to turn fitness inherent and grant travel powers at level four or whatever it is, they should rethink the entire damn idea of pools. Why do we still need to take prereqs so that we can be slightly more defensively able? Does that make sense? Does it contribute to balance? Maybe someone thinks the answer to one of those questions is yes, but I'd love to know why.

You know, Hopeling, I was wondering why it seemed like my hecatomb proc in follow up was firing every single time. It wasn't until reading this thread that I remembered that a) it is a store bought version and b) they haven't changed how PPM is calculated yet. Duh.

So yeah, uhhh, take your time on issue 24, guys!

Resistance bonuses aren't very good. Tough is your best bet in that you need it to get weave in the first place and it's a decent chunk of s/l resist. I find the shield wall global to be pretty poor in comparison to the glad armor global but it's basically the next best thing after tough.