Rigel_Kent

Electricity Mastery

Bugs

• Electric Fence, Shocking Bolt, and Power Sink drain a set amount of endurance in PvE. Endurance draining powers are supposed to drain a percentage in PvE.

Radiant Aura > Aid Self, Radiant Aura > Aid Other, Mutation > Resuscitate. You could make a case for Stimulant, but be aware it'll be a highly situational power due to its awful animation time. AM already reduces mez durations significantly, so Stimulant is only for prebuffing someone else on the team who absolutely, positively, cannot be mezzed, even for an instant. (For example, duoing vs purples with another Rad/Rad defender.)

Recall Friend is primarily for stealthing through missions or helping slower teammates get to missions when you have a very fast travel power (LRT SS+SJ or Afterburner). True, sometimes someone on your team derps out and gets himself killed far, far away from the rest of the team, but why are you spending a power choice on that guy?

If you're looking for stuff-hit-the-fan powers, instead of Aid Self, Aid Other, or Recall Friend, consider: Vengeance, Fallout, EM Pulse, Atomic Bomb, and Force of Nature. The pairs of Vengeance+Fallout and EMP+Nuke are also a bit synergistic.

Unless you take EM Pulse, Atomic Bomb, or Force of Nature, Conserve Power won't be necessary. AM+Stamina has a crashless build's endurance needs well covered. With a crash, Conserve Power or Ageless destiny is recommended.

It's not politically correct, but we have to remember empathy is a below average defender primary. (Unless you can name six defender primaries worse than empathy.)

So we have to be very careful about drawing conclusions about defender performance from empathy performance alone, or assuming that the problems empathy faces aren't unique to empathy. For example, Thermal Radiation and Time Manipulation -- two other sets frequently misplayed as "healer" sets -- aren't at all redundant with destiny buffs.

The Power Analyzer helps us get critter buff power names. Those will appear under stats. Debuffs and attacks, we'd have to analyze the critter's target.

Original post is not a leak, it's a suggestion.

That said, power descriptions for Psionic Melee, which supposedly involves psi blades like Penelope Yin has somehow, are accessible on the beta server.

So I'd concentrate on that Psionic Armor suggestion, which sounds very interesting. Make sure you make it different enough from Willpower, in both theme and mechanics, to warrant its place.

There are only two non-controversial issues with endurance draining powers.

1) Endurance drain scales per archetype in PvP. Ones is used instead in PvE. So in PvP, defenders drain better, in PvE, all ATs drain the same. No explanation has ever been given for this discrepancy. (Though fixing this discrepancy probably won't help blasters.)

2) Higher-rank critters were given large endurance pools with the explicit design goal that they should not run themselves out of endurance by activating their own powers. In other words, base recovery alone is sufficient for nearly all critters to spam all their powers, and this is intentional. Thus, recovery debuffs remain helpful, but endurance drain without recovery debuffs is of extremely limited value. (Though Electric Blast has tons of recovery debuffing.)

Other issues, like whether Voltaic Sentinel is a fair substitute for a "tier 3" style blast, are up for debate.

Your blaster and stalker don't have to match theirs, but they do have to match each other.

All right, staying away from the math, since I'm a bit under the weather.

From a fun factor standpoint alone, stalker crits just seem not so fun for most primaries. With, of course, exceptions (Claws with the 6th Superior ATE woo woo). 5% or 10% chance to do double damage leaves the distinct flavor of vanilla in my mouth. I got more interesting crit mechanics than that out of tabletop D&D circa year 2000.

If the devs feel low probability crits are what they want for the archetype, that's fine. Just make them do something more than double damage. Controllers get double damage crits basically all the time; stalkers and corruptors quite a bit of the time. If scrappers get crits as little as 5% of the time, those crits should be correspondingly more meaningful.

I'll admit one complication: Getting multiple effects to trigger off the same random crit chance roll is tricky with the current engine. Does anyone have an example of this happening? I can think of a roundabout way to do it, using the "must hit at lower%" mechanic, but that would mean accuracy, tohit/def, and relative level would influence crit chance in new ways, a potentially awesome or a potentially awful outcome. Unfortunately, I'm in no condition to do the math right now. And I'm not sure it would work in the first place.

These are comic book origin stories. They're five generic backstories, each born of a different modern fascination, that explain how the hero got powers, and are so frequently used that really, pretty much every modern super hero falls into one of them.

Science: Hero gets powers from being exposed to some exotic substance or energy. "Ever since I got back from the exploration mission, I can't stop exploding. OH GOD GET BACK."
Technology: Hero gets powers from inventing or coming in possession of some machine or devices. "This may look like an ordinary salad fork, but in actuality...."
Natural: Hero gets powers from a life of training and ascetic discipline. "..."
Mutant: Hero gets powers from being born different from others of its kind. "So like omigod the principal totally almost suspended me for hanging by my ears from the goal post at the pep rally. She is such a racist."
Magic: Hero gets powers from a relationship with supernatural entities or forces. "My father was a god. My mother was a Holstein. DON'T. ASK."

I'm leaning toward Technology (as you are "in possession of" your own awesome mechanical self), but depending on your backstory and powersets, it could possibly be any of the five.

Mutant Robot: "Hey Doc... you said all these units are supposed to have exactly the same AI, down to every last bit, right? You better take a look at this." "A fractal quantum evolutionary transform?! It isn't supposed to be possible! Quick, give it a really big gun!"

None of the new powersets currently on beta, including inactive powersets, are origin gated.

Relax and enjoy the holiday!

Updated above post to reflect 9 minute adjustment on Arcanaville's defeat all, and combined her results with TwoHeadedBoy's to get a better sample size.

It was a little freaky how Arcana and THB perfectly duplicated several of their results. This actually increased the confidence level; p-value is now
Please don't stop based on anything I post. Stopping when the p-value reaches something you like would bias the results!

Good work being done here.

All things being equal, small differences before 20 should become magnified after 20, since archetypes are less differentiated before 20.

(Of course, not all things are equal, since critters after 20 are different from critters before 20, and may very well pose more of a challenge to one archetype over another. We'll have to wait and see for that.)

I think it's possible, though I have doubts whether blaster is the right archetype for it.

If one of the blaster secondaries were a sidearm or even just a mean lookin' knife, that'd be ace. Or if your concept were some sort of sniper slash elemental falcon punch hybrid.

Otherwise, the benefit of Boost Range probably isn't worth the cost of, well, being a blaster.

Beam/Traps or Traps/Beam may be closer to the playstyle you're looking for. Malice of the Corruptor and Defender's Bastion both get you the same 10% range set bonus as the blaster ATE set. Sprinkle with various */Range multiple type enhancements, and your range should still be sufficiently large to get the look and feel you want, without being so large that enemies are scattering panicked to the four winds every single spawn.

With a nicely range slotted Web Grenade and all the other nice trixx in Traps, I have a feeling you'll soon forget all about Boost Range and Energy Manipulation.

Re: Empaths being "must have" in the early days of the game

Healer is a team role in City of Heroes.

This screenshot is legit.


My cat is the reincarnation of Bob Fosse.

Twenty-nine Venetian blinds, Matilda won't come waltzing with me.