Rigel_Kent

As you suspected, the single target beatdown just gets better and better. The animation times are kind of crummy on the tier 1 and 1.5 blasts (Mental Blast, Subdue). They didn't get the benefit of blaster animation time normalization due to the huge disconnect between the (awful) blaster version of psi blast and the defender version, which corruptors get. But as you've noticed, the animation speeds on the tier 2 and 3 blasts (TK Blast, Will Domination) are amazing. Sure, big hits don't leverage Scourge as well, but at those animation speeds, who cares?

Psi's AoE is a bit quirky. The slow animations are a bummer, the slow DoT on Tornado is a bummer. But both AoEs apply significant, stackable recharge debuffs, and both have an expanded radius of effect (60' for Scream compared to most ranged cones at 40', 20' for Tornado compared to most targeted aoes at 15'). Forget the crummy stun power, those big recharge debuffs are the real utility of the set. Also, the damage on both AoEs comes out to average, provided you get all the Tornado ticks in.

Whew, it's a little late for me to be hex editing and converting file formats and stuff, but here you go. This is just one example. All original CoH face textures were similarly edited to create villainous versions.

face_skin_head_10.texture


v_face_skin_head_10.texture


In this case, the villainous version's face is shorter, the smile isn't as wide, there's less of a sparkle in his eyes, and there are dark lines added on the eyelids.

As I stated before, only the villainous versions of the hero faces are accessible in the current game version.

Thanks for the screenshots! But it's still hard to describe how they differ from the original faces without a side-by-side comparison.

Re: Static textures or dynamic lighting?

The textures were changed, it's not just a trick of the lighting. This can be confirmed if you know how to look at the 2D texture images. The darkened lines on villain face 7's cheeks, for instance, are photoshopped directly into the 2D texture.

Should I post the textures or would that get me modslapped?

I call them villain faces for clarity, because that's their original name. They were labeled "Villain Face #" when they were added in CoV, alongside the original hero "Face #"s. When I say "Villain Face 1", that's Mr. Smirk. The original "Face 1" is someone else entirely. "Villain Face 7" would be the darkified "Face 1", while "Face 7" was said to resemble Val Kilmer.

The costume creator now refers to "Villain Face #" as simply "Face #". At the time of that change, many players, and presumably some Cryptic devs, were unaware of the faces' history. As I recall, most of the CoV team jumped ship almost immediately after launch, and were not very good at commenting or documenting their work.

Despite the rename, the current first dozen or so "Face #" textures (really "Villain Face #") are only the CoV-side ones. The CoH-side ones are gone.

Male "Face 1" had a determined look, rather than smiling or friendly, so the CoV devs just upped the contrast on him to give him darker lines and shading. The result is male "Villain Face 7". If you have a dark skin color you can see just a little difference on his lips, under his eyebrows, etc. If your skin is pale, however, the contrast hack fails; his lips and eyelids look much too dark, and it looks like he has dirt, scars, or Star Trek prosthetics on his cheeks.

Found a screenshot of "Face 1" on this post:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...69#post3395369
Notice the lack of dark lines on the lips, and lighter shading over the eyes and cheeks. Unlike Villain Face 7, this face looked okay on pale skin tones.

The male smiling, friendly hero faces got the heaviest handed changes. Obviously, the CoV devs had to do more work to make the corresponding villain faces look sinister. "Villain Face 3" is probably the best (worst?) example; at the top of his nose, you can see the angry eyebrow lines are more prominent than the original.

It's a long story.

A couple dozen of the current faces are alterations of the CoH launch faces, with dark lines and scowls added to make them more villainous. These alterations were added in CoV as "villain faces", separate from the original faces. Only redside toons could pick villain faces, only blueside toons could pick the original faces.

Some time after CoV's launch, the tailor options were combined, so that costume parts were no longer restricted by alignment.

Some time after that, players with astoundingly bad eyesight began to complain of the "duplicate" faces. This resulted in the removal of the original hero faces, such that villain faces were the only options left in the tailor. As someone who's been looking at the same faces for seven years, I can assure you the hero faces and villain faces are not duplicates.

I just wish I had a screenshot to illustrate...

Welp, it's official. Issue 21 has finally cut-and-pasted the CoV villainfaces, overwriting all the hero faces from launch. Even the heroes who I've painstakingly kept away from the tailor now have the darkity dark growly cliche 90s anti-hero look. Ugh.

I'm still holding out hope that someone in the art department has sharp enough eyes (and the backups!) to finally catch and fix this six-year-old blunder.

ED softcapped Afterburner (with enough slotting in Fly to reach the Afterburner improved cap, of course) puts you somewhere between the SJ (78.18@50) and SS (92.5@50) caps, but closer to the SS cap.

So, yeah, aerial super speeding, fun! (If you can spare the power picks and enhancement slots.)

Even if you don't enhance fly speed in either of these powers (stealth in Fly, LotG in Afterburner, perhaps), you still get some extra speed from Afterburner, due to Fly+Swift going over the normal fly speed cap already. You'll still be a bit slower than SJ'ers, but you'll be faster than Sprint+Ninja/Beast (about damn time). So if you're tight on slots, that might be a good compromise for you.

Let's see... hmmm...

It's hard to tell without knowing your playstyle, but Radiation Infection might be optional in this specific build, for those specific purposes. I can't see your defense numbers so I'm not sure whether the Discouraging Words are needed for you or not.

Oops. Sorry, I saw "endgame content" and assumed teaming. Because... well, you know.

Maybe have one build for soloing and the other for endgame stuff?

The pool power rules (including APPs and PPPs):

* Increasing a primary or secondary power's base end cost by as much as 25% is okay for all pool powers.
* Increasing a primary or secondary power's base recharge by as much as 100% is okay, but only for especially useful pool powers.
* All other nerfs suck.

Spring Attack broke the rules.

Devs, if any of your coworkers are genuinely surprised that Spring Attack is as unpopular as other powers that break these rules, say, blaster Melt Armor or stalker snipes or the entire Presence pool, kindly direct them to this post. Thank you.

Careful. You're not an empath. Taking a dead weight power (or three) just for 2.5 seconds less AM downtime is not something you should feel required to do.

In particular, if you drop Fighting pool, you can pick up the anti-wipe trifecta. I have yet to meet a problem that Vengeance-Fallout-Mutation can't solve.

At the very least take Vengeance, since it's the fastest animating of the three, and it's also pretty much the whole point of going into Leadership to begin with. If you're not taking Vengeance, might as well get out of Leadership entirely and take your nuke instead.

The Generic Giant Monster Foot Stomp is a fairly common, and annoying, magnitude 10 knockback attack. If you're going to be in melee with a GM much, you want at least 10 knockback protection. Otherwise, the bare minimum of knockback protection is good enough to deal with the 0.67 knockback attacks just about every NPC in the game has.

Acrobatics for knockback protection is a trap. If you're not a super jumper, you have to expend two power choices to get it. More than one slot in Acrobatics is a huge trap. Not much of Acro's knock protection is enhanceable, so enhancing Acro gives you 1.5 per slot, compared to Karma, Steadfast, or Zephyr, which give you 4 per slot. At the ED cap, Acro gives about 12 protection.

If you're really in a power crunch and have to drop powers, it might be helpful to pick either melee or ranged and specialize for that.

In melee, Electron Haze and Psychic Scream are unwieldy to use. Proton Volley is also iffy.

At range, Irradiate and Psychic Shockwave don't do you much good. Mind Probe and Telekinetic Thrust are also iffy.

Neutron Bomb works both ways. It's animation time isn't that bad (Irradiate just makes everything else look slow). And its debuff duration is decent. Taking things like debuff magnitude, duration, target cap, and recharge time all into account, I'd say Neutron Bomb is the best debuff power in the set unless you have ridiculous amounts of recharge bonuses to perma Irradiate.

First reaction: LOL THEY NERFD REGEN

Second reaction: Whew, glad none of my custom critters has Revive. Their XP compared to their difficulty is already really bad. This would make their XP even worse. Those who use Reviving custom critters for story arc purposes might need to readjust so the work/payoff ratio doesn't go even farther off balance.

Sonic definitely brings more to a wealthy team than FF.

Freedom will shake things up, though. We won't be able to count on teammates to be IO'd, softcapped, or any of that jazz, except in locked content like iTrials. And we won't be able to count on teammates being wealthy, at least, not for the first month or so...

Anyway, any discussion of Sonic defender balance needs to look at two things: 1) Sonic compared to buff/debuff sets within the same defender AT, and 2) Sonic defenders compared to Sonic controllers, corruptors and masterminds. If Sonic controllers, corruptors and masterminds are fine, then at least part of the problem is with defenders, not with Sonic per se.

I kind of like the idea of modifying nukes based on AT, except blasters are likely to get the short end of the stick.

"Let's make it do this AND that for corruptors." "Okay!" "And let's make it do this AND that for defenders." "Okay!" "But it can only do this, for blasters, because they're blasters and not allowed to do anything else." "Of course."

See also: Proliferated blaster primaries.

I know nobody's asked for this, but it'd be thematic:

Add defense debuff resistance to regen. Those bullet wounds healed up instantly, right?

Though I'm still standing by Corruptor, I thought of another Defender advantage: you get to skip Time Crawl if you don't want it.

Real numbers for comparison!

Night Fall (original Defender/Corruptor version)
Range 60' 20 degree cone 10 target max
Recharge 10s Endcost 13.10
Types AoE, Negative
10 x 0.11 (1.10) negative damage scale
-5.25% tohit for 10s

Night Fall (Scrapper/Stalker APP or Blaster/Mastermind PPP)
Range 60' 20 degree cone 10 target max
Recharge 20s Endcost 16.38
Types AoE, Negative
10 x 0.11 (1.10) negative damage scale
-5.25% tohit for 10s

Umbral Torrent
Range 80' 30 degree cone 10 target max
Recharge 15s Endcost 14.35
Types AoE, Negative, Smashing
0.96 negative damage scale
-5.25% tohit for 10s
Knockback

The rundown: The APP and PPP versions have recharge time doubled and endcost increased 25%, as is usual with pool powers. Umbral Torrent has expanded range at the cost of 50% longer recharge and a bit higher endcost, and front-loaded damage at the cost of some damage over time. Also a messed up smashing flag.

If you like Defiance 2.0, and building up with little attacks before letting loose your good attack, Beam Rifle might be your style. Its usefulness is limited for blasters, though, since we have a habit of dropping enemy HP quickly so that teammates can finish them off faster, and when an enemy's HP bar goes bye bye, any Disintegration on it goes bye bye too.

On the other hand, most blasters I know just Aim-BU and ignore Defiance in the same way that defenders ignore Vigilance. If you're more like that, where you feel the first 5 seconds of a fight are too critical to be putting off your best damage powers, go with Ice. You can go straight into Aim-BU-Rain-Breath with no setup, no screwing around, no worries about certain enemies going down too soon.

Honestly, Ice's AoE is not that bad, in comparison to the AoE wimpy sets we've been getting recently. I think it only has a reputation for low AoE because it's close to but not quite a mirror of the Fire primary, which can Aim-BU-Rain-Breath-FB.

Finally, if you like utility, you will love /Ice.

Another combo gimmick based set? Yeesh.

But with good enough animations I'll forgive.

I'm passing on this one. The set is bland. If I wanted an uninspired sci-fi gun that did nothing but vanilla damage -- no drone launcher, no laser bayonet, not even a simple repulsor beam for flavor -- I can have my pick of first person shooters. Even Fire Blast has a rain power to break up the monotony.

It did inspire me to pick up some pulse rifle attacks on my Bots mastermind, though. Photon Grenade is a halfway interesting power. A shame; Pulse Rifle was off to a promising start, but the devs got their heads locked into a crummy combo mechanic instead of spending some time at the drawing board.