Rakeeb

Monica Richter.

Richter... having to do with seismic activity.

Faultline?

Poor, poor Geko.

We know who's really in charge there, man. He is IN for it.

He'd better be able to save me 15% on car insurance!

Poor, poor Geko.

We know who's really in charge there, man. He is IN for it.

[ QUOTE ]
Please award badges retroactively. Getting Shard Tf's done is a non-trivial operation. It is not right that they should have to be done again.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wrong. It's right for them to hold the TF badges back.

See, back when you were running around and getting these things, they were considerably easier than they are now on Test. If they datamined, then you'd be getting credit for something that you essentially didn't do -- the TFs, in makeup and difficulty, are very different from the previous ones.

So, since they're increasing the difficulty, they'll have to hold the TF badges back for only those teams that -prove- that they've earned them.

This powerset is loaded with single-target damage, and very little in reliable crowd control.

My only caveat with this powerset is the low Endurance costs associated with these attacks. The Sonic attacks debuff the mob's resistance to ALL attacks, not just the continuing Sonic barrage. Accordingly, it needs a mild tap increase in Endurance Costs, as it's acting as a Debuff on top of a nuke.

On Defiance:

At low levels, Defiance is -incredible-. At that point, attacks aren't slotted, and the boosts that are received at that point are far and away better than anything else available. Defiance turns an igniomous death into sure victory, as long as the hit lands -- an element of suspense and triumph. In fact, Defiance at low levels is likely too powerful -- it exceeds anything available by such a margin as to overpower Blasters in the early game. This lasts until about level 22.

HOWEVER:

In the 22+ game, with attacks boosted by SO Enhancements, Defiance becomes increasingly less influential, and less worthy of player attention, and Mobs become much stronger in their offense against a rapidly depleting Blaster HP Pool. With the changeover in scaling at that point, it becomes obvious that Defiance is still mildly useful, but proportionally it will not save a Blaster in the same way it did in the pre-SO world. Furthermore, the further a Blaster advances in level, the weaker the Defiance ability becomes, so that in the endgame, it's only useful if left at 20% HP or less.

My solution to this: have Defiance boost BASE damage, not ENHANCED damage. This would work much like the Kheldians' Interspacial Link powers in application, save that Blasters need to stay at a decent 100% damage point. To do this:

100%-40%: normal damage.

40%-30%: Damage boosted by 10%, base.

30%-20%: Damage boosted by 20%, base.

20%-10%: Damage boosted by 40%, base.

10%-5%: Damage boosted by 70%, base.

5%-1%: Damage boosted by 100%, base.

In the early game, this will allow a Blaster to exceed his limits without shattering the game engine with a 500% Melee attack (far, far more than what the game can adequately account for with the Mobs as they are). In the late game, this will make Defiance a still-worthy addition to a Blaster's arsenal, and give them a significant advantage in the Damage realm. It will make them respectable in PvE, and will let them not be written off in PvP.

These guys exist. They're called "Rularuu" and people avoid them like the plague.

Desperation sounds cool, but we'd best be doing our best damage at about 25%. Anything lower than that -- and even that's a stretch -- and we're pushing minion death on a team.

He thinks people need Defenders to cap out in various statistics. Uh, not to rain on your parade States, but Blasters can cap Damage on their own about every 90 seconds or so with SOs and Build Up, and that's keeping Aim in reserve -- another 66% buff. We'd better have that 500% cap if that's gonna work out. Tanks and Defenders can hit that cap as well. Tanks can cap out their Resistance on just the might of their -reduced- SOs. Defense and Regeneration have no cap. If they want to make Defenders useful in that sense again, they're gonna have to take another look at things.

Interesting perspective on the war with Oranbega by Azuria. I wonder what kind of conversations exist between herself and Akarist -- they have entirely different opinions of what happened out there. That may be because of the different perspectives; Oranbega maintains that they were attacked by Mu first, with the Muvians devastating them and forcing them to withdraw to North America from their home in Africa, whereas the Muvian Azuria insists that Oranbega was targeted due to its magical abilities as an "affront to the gods" thing.

Oranbega also maintains in its histories that Ermeeth and Hequat were former and now estranged lovers, and that the mighty Hequat came with Muvian sky ships to burn Oranbega to the ground.

For what it's worth, this poster agrees with Akarist in most things -- Hequat's actions in the past were at best questionable and at worst genocidal. She's also been implicated in a sort of genetic breeding experiment, wherein she continually refined the strain of humanity she had serving her to such a powerful point that they were well-nigh unstoppable. It's conceivable that some of that strain still exists today, in the form of Mutant heroes and villains.

However, what IS certain is that Azuria is being deliberately deceptive, or is very, very ignorant of Oranbega's perspective, which she has no excuse to be, since she has the Oranbega summoning premeir as a semi-permanent guest.

EDIT: Darn. Lots of other people made these points before. Ah well. Oh, and the Blood of the Black Stream is entirely possible as a Muvian AT -- sort of the result of Hecate's eugenics program.

Power loot! She can probably copy the opposing card's abilities for awhile.

Know when to Control, and when to Attack. Controlling that Minion with 3 HP left isn't a very smart idea; attacking that Boss with a full life bar doesn't quite seem intelligent either.

Happy Anniversary, Positron. Long haul for you guys, but you made it, riding out WoW even.

Now get back in there before SGT 3rd Poz discovers that somebody's out of place.

10 1/2.

Tenderfoot.

You all DO realize that Lord Recluse is an Incarnate as well, right?

Here's some food for thought: other than Hero1 and Ajax, we don't know the composition of Omega Team. What we DO know is that

<SPOILER>



They didn't do it. They went to the other side, sure, but they didn't cut off the Ritki's portal technology as far as we can tell, unless one of them was the most kick-[censored] spellcaster in the known universe. Remember, the Ritki are cut off from their own dimension by a powerful magical shield that surrounds their entire dimension. We're talking one so powerful that the Ritki tried to create Mages among their own converted Lost ranks to handle. They couldn't do it. So the shield is of such great magnitude as to be totally impregnable.

So: if Omega Team didn't do it, who did? And how did Nemesis know that they were coming ten years before their first appearance, and four years after Portal technology was first introduced? Lots of holes in the backstory here.

Statesman -- no lecture: just quick suggestions.

1) Damage cap. Beaten to death already; you know what we want.

2) Secondary versatility: you and your boys are already on this, but it needs to happen fairly quickly. Controllers are powerful. I'd know. I play Earth / FF as an alt. Mind is devastating late-game, like all Controllers. Blasters need to have something to look forward to.

3) Damage to look forward to. Let's have something to work towards after Level 32.

4) Take another look at the supernukes. Full Auto is preferred due to its practicality; it can be relied upon. See what you can do for the other abilities.

5) PvP: Ratchet up the En Drain to 60%. Make it something worth taking Electrical Blast and Kinetics for. Oh, and take it out of EM Pulse or make the Radiation crew pay for it somehow.

1) Wow! there's over a hundred people reading the Blaster forum!

2) Ranged Damage tends to be about 2/3 of Melee Damage per attack. So, right there a Blaster has a de facto 33% Damage Resistance overall (since less damage is incoming) along with no Defense or Regeneration or Mez Resist... but the Scrappers can get 75% Resistance or 95% Defense or 600% Regeneration easily, along with the various other contraptions that they've got in their pools (AoE Fear, AoE Disorient, Max HP Boost, lots and lots of Mez Resistance, self +Recharge). So, essentially, if a Blaster only takes Ranged attacks and a Scrapper only takes Melee attacks, then the Blaster is wildly underpowered, since we're only mitigating about 30% of incoming damage while the Scrapper hovers about about 80% mitigation. Oh, and they get a bit more damage. According to that, then Scrappers take less risk for more reward in the form of damage.

It may be unfortunate for that, but needs must when the devil drives. At absolute worst for non-PLers it's an XP / hour hit in the Shard when trying to do multiple killtasks at the same time with a widely spread group. I can think of better ways to get XP at those levels.

Huh. Part of me is somewhat worried by "skills". If they ever interfere with the combat system, I'll be past somewhat worried. I'll be closing in on "upset" -- that's a strictly non-casual gamer device.

I guess I'll be doing a lot of Exemplaring to rerun old missions.

Here comes the change: En Drain does need to be socketed on attacks to be effective, but it's potentially far more lethal than the other secondary effects. If that mob is at 0 En, he's done -- every hit you put out will keep him there.

Now, ArchVillians have a mighy 800 En and regenerate that En at a rate of 50 every 5 seconds. That's incredible. What's more incredible is that they don't seem to be vulnerable to the -recovery flag that Electric blasters rely upon for victory. Without that, we're very flashy and largely useless Blasters.

Electrical Blast does have a power to stop En Recovery: it's called Short Circuit.

However, that power's recovery debuff flag doesn't seem to work on ArchVillians, from what my fellow players are saying. I haven't tried it in Issue 2, but I'll be doing so soon, so I guess I'll see it for myself.

I happen to think Electrical Blast and Electrical Manipulation are both rather effective if used correctly, but I'm just one hero. Try them for yourself.

Oh, and I use Thunder Strike and Havoc Punch quite a bit; at least once a battle. When the mobs can't strike back those two attacks are very effective.

As to Slow and Snare effects:

These are Debuffs. Debuffs differ from Magnitude statuses in that they take full effect immediately, scale with level, and do not stack upon themselves from the same ability.

Other Debuffs are -Def, -Res, -Recovery, -Regeneration, -Speed, -Recharge, -Dam. There are likely more, but I don't know them off the top of my head. Some of these are very rare but are in game -- -regeneration, for instance, is only in Malta hands.

It's a case of taste...

... and what takes an obvious advantage of the game engine.

In this case, once Minion HP goes up the proposed (and, apparently, much debated) 30%, the ability to quickly mitigate their various abilities will mesh rather well with killing them quickly. People who can do both will excel in such a system.

ASCII working.

It's a lost art.

Having read the juvenile retorts coming off of this particular post, I'm somewhat hesitant to post here for fear of either total ignorance or complete intolerance to another opinion, but at the risk of being flamed by people who'd either rant hard over and over or make personal attacks and childish nicknames, I've decided to add something more substantive to this particular discussion than what's been seen.

I agree first of all with Erratic in that crowd control and damage mitigation is beginning to become somewhat more important in the life of the average Blaster. Simply killing everything isn't all that simple at 35+, as various villians with Holds, Stuns, and other little annoyances begin to make life rather difficult on us. We've seen more than enough posts on that, thank you all the same; it's obvious that debt will be incurred if the same tactics used before Issue 2 debuted are used here.

But, I also agree with Haephaestus in that the art of the Alpha Strike is very important to the normal Blaster. We really do have that little HP, and outside of Inspirations and perhaps Aid Self we've got no real way to regain it quickly. We're also the lightest defensive AT in the game, for obvious reasons -- I believe with all abilities 6-slotted Devices gets the gold here for defense, with a staggering +24%. Now, delving into the Power Pool can net another (CJ 12% + Ha 10% + We 12%) 34% or a total of 58% Defense. To do this, the Defense - minded Blaster must run 3 toggles, Hasten, and toss Smoke Grenade. That's quite the En cost for that much Defense -- SR scrappers can get 60% with just one toggle. The applications here aren't all that good, either -- 12% of that depends on mob level, so it can quickly descend into uselessness, and this won't adequately shield one from an even-con LT, let alone an even-con Boss. Only even-con Minions are defended against well here, and perhaps +1.

So, we can say with some safety that this tactic has become obsolete. Very well; let's explore some options.

Continuing on with the assumption of Assault Rifle, we've got three direct mitigation powers and a host of Cone AoE's. The two big damage ones, Flamethrower and Full Auto, need time to work and allow the enemy to respond. Obviously this is a bad thing. So, we need some method by which we can attack the enemies and not be harmed in the doing for the duration of the various attacks here.

One can accomplish this if one uses their mitigating attacks properly. Consider: Getting the enemies in an assumed clump, we can open with M30, tossing the enemies back a bit and onto the ground. For the next four seconds, while they get up, they cannot respond in any way. This is an obvious time to use FlameThrower, which lasts for about three seconds. But you'll need to renew the Knockdown quickly; Buckshot could do it here as it's quick and gets the job done. Over the majority of them go (you DO have Cone Range and KnockBack in Buckshot, right?), granting another shot at using a DoT in relative safety. Out comes Full Auto, and the now heavily damaged mobs should sit down and stay down.

But now we come to the payoff. What are we to do against Bosses? They'll survive all this (the LT's will too, just with not much HP) and they might even shrug off the KnockBack.

The answer is to kill them quickly. Right; you knew that. In Assault Rifle's case, you'd cut them down with Slug and Snipe mixed together, shooting rapid-fire Beanbags if you need to get one to stop attacking for a few moments.

Of course, this little field exercise doesn't take into account Trip Mine, which will of course make life much easier for the AR / Dev player. Just set it off and clean up; the Bosses will still be alive, of course, but with Inspirations and targeting them specifically you should be OK. Of course, try and knock them down, or even get gutsy and Beanbag - Taser. That's a combo you don't see every day.

The moral of the story? It's not impossible to excel under the conditions of Issue 2. It's just not as simple or as quick as it used to be, and Blasters' various Crowd Control powers are beginning to matter quite a bit more.