Sailboat

In your first build you had Slash, which is a not-very-good single-target attack in a set with several much better single-target attacks. I see you replaced it with Slice, which is a pretty nice cone. I like that a lot better. Don't hesitate to use Slice in crowds; it's pretty quick and does okay damage, and the cone is wide.

I don't see Hack in your later build, though. One of the nice things about Broadsword is you get three very solid single-target attacks you can chain: Headsplitter, Disembowel, and Hack. Many sets have only two good ones, but Hack is unusually good and gives Broadsword a third. Many, many times I find myself happy to have one more hard hitter queued up, so I recommend having and slotting all three. It also should be possible to chain them continuously if you have enough recharge.

Soething I've wondered about for a long time.

There are a number of powers that reduce enemy damage, notably Dark Miasma's Darkest Night toggle and Kinetic Melee's extra effect, among others (even Shield Defense gets a little of it in Against All Odds). It does not appear to be an enhanceable property.

• Does it stack from different sources?
  
• How effective is this mechanic at increasing character survival?
  
• Does it reduce the final damage you would have taken by the stated percentage? I.e., does -10% damage reduce a 100-point hit to a 90-point hit, or is it factored in somewhere in the formula, like damage enhancement in a player's power, meaning it does not reduce final damage by the full 10%? (Not sure I'm expressing that intelligibly, sorry.)
  
• Is it reduced by AV resistance (which is 85%, iirc)?
  
• Assuming it's at least somewhat useful, what powerset combinations would give the most -damage? I am inclined to think it would synergize with damage resistance pretty well, so maybe pairing -dmg with high resistance would be best? Perhaps Kinetic Melee / Electric Armor?

Anyone have any thoughts on whether an Overwhelming Force Knockback-to-Knockdown proc would improve (or hurt) Trip Mines?

I can't decide whether I like the idea of giving up true knockback in Trip Mine or not...one of my all-time favorite things in COH is blasting an enemy with one trip mine and having them land on another trip mine. It's the most interesting power in the secondary.

I don't always use Trip Mines, but when I do, I prefer a big pile of them. Stay 'splodey, my friends.

Dink, we could really use more animal parts, especially tails. Pretty much everything, but my specific interests lean toward:

• More distinct dog breeds -- an easy place to add variety is with more tails. The fox/wolf tails are fine for some breeds, but there's a lot more variety out there. More than any other costume piece I can think of, I want a medium-short, slightly-curved, "whip" type tail, like you'd see on a Dalmatian, Lab, Weimeraner, pit bull, beagle, and countless other short-haired breeds. I'd also like short-haired breed dog heads, but the tail is easier and has wider applicability. The cat tail is a poor compromise.
  
• While we're at it, would it be possible to have a different tail animation? Every tail that moves now moves the same, a sort of vaguely cat-like sweep. Although "tail emotes" are not your department, and probably pie-in-the-sky thinking, a few very standardized options for tail movement would be very welcome. Not everyone is a catgirl.
  
• More bird parts -- especially beaks. A non-bird-head beak (or better yet, several types -- curved parrot beak, straight bill, duck beak, raptor beak) that can be attached to normal faces would save a lot of us from making do with the harlequin masks.

Also, I don't know if you do weapon customization, but we could use something better for a pole axe or polearm than we now have.

Thanks very much for reading.

When you shuffle off this mortal coil,
expire,
buy the farm,
kick the bucket,
meet your maker,
perish,
get your ticket punched,
pass on,
pass over,
push up daisies,
sleep with the fishes,
join that Celestial choir. <----(They give you the uniform.)

The Arcanaville Horror.

I dunno, I might have had that issue.

People were seeing my mic light on when they talked, even though I was using a headset and didn't have the sound particularly loud, and they'd hear themselves echo.

Each time this happened, what I did as a work-around was go into Options and go to the "mic test" function (I forget the exact name) where you can set your mic's pick up level and see a bar moving (to indicate sound level) when you talk. I'd move the slider the tiniest movement possible and then save it.

That immediately fixed the echoing completely. Since I had barely actually changed the setting, I was surprised it worked -- but then I noticed the two check boxes (for "echo cancellation" and something else with a similar name).

The boxes were checked off before and after the fix, but my guess is that Teamspeak somehow "forgot" that echo cancellation (and the other one) were checked, and it wasn't adjusting the slider that made the difference so much as it was "saving with the boxes checked" re-informed Teamspeak to use echo cancellation.

The problem seemed intermittent. But now the people I play with regularly know to tell me to go tap my slider whenever they hear the echo.

It's not a permanent solution, but it's not too burdensome. Give it a try.

The gap has narrowed as well -- the low-end stuff is now priced higher. Can't snap up too much for 150 million anymore. At least that part makes sense, if lots of people have been buying cheapies. (Isn't it downright weird when the COH/V market acts rationally? Just doesn't feel right, does it?)

Incidentally I had a spectacular instance of luck with conversion last night. Might as well tell the story here.

Over the past few weeks I've been slowly assembling a big, expensive-by-my-standards build, and I was getting close to finished. I had already acquired four of the five Ragnarok pieces I wanted, lacking only the triple. Now, Ragnaroks are available on the market...and I have some money left...I could have bought the triple outright. But I've been feeling cheap after blowing so much cash and so many A-merits on this build, so I bid-crept up from underneath on both the recipe and the crafted versions until it was obvious I wasn't going to get a bargain, and declined to actually pay the going rate.

Ah well. I shrugged internally and went off to play a character. When he loaded up, I saw he'd had one purchase come in on the market. It turned out to be a low-priced purple (I don't recall which set) -- apparently the last one I'd managed to pick up before the prices rose a bit. My eye strayed over to the enhancement tray, and I saw that I had one converter on this character.

What the heck, right?

I stuck it into the converter, set it to "out of set conversion," and clicked. Out popped a Ragnarok Damage/Recharge/Accuracy.

What are the odds of that? The piece I've been looking for for days (but too cheap to buy) on the first and only conversion I rolled that night? Looks like there are 10 purple sets, unless I've missed one, and it can't be one from the set I converted, so that's...something like 1 in 54 of getting the one piece I'd been looking for?

It's probably karmic balance for my Summer Event runs, heh (at one point, 2 procs in 55 runs, although it eventually got a bit better).

The Issue 24 Blast set changes should further improve the experience of playing Defenders.

The actual gameplay is quite dynamic, too. To me, it feels more like stuff happening than watching a picture of stuff happening.

Conventional wisdom for Willpower is to slot for defense first. After you have solid high defense (frankly Willpower does not really need to be soft-capped, and it can be tricky to actually soft-cap it on a Brute or Scrapper), THEN fit in as many hit point bonuses as you can, and then regen bonuses (usually those two come together, but the hit points are more important as a goal).

+Recharge should be way less important as a slotting goal -- Willpower itself gains essentially nothing from recharge bonuses, so recharge only matters for your primary (and frankly that depends on your projected attack chain -- you may not need much +recharge at all.

Occasionally the topic comes up of how Super Reflexes compares to other, newer sets -- Shield, specifically. Example: Why choose Super Reflexes?

I know they buffed SR a bit in the past with the scaling resistances, but if they were inclined to buff it again, I would like to see a buff that addresses its greatest weakness, instead of adding a damage power or something silly.

What is SR's greatest weakness? Well, once you have got your DDR to 95%, it's no longer defense debuffs. :P I'd say the thing my SRs worry about most of all is to-hit buffs to my enemies: Nemesis Vengeance, Devouring Earth Quartz drops, Rulaaru eyeballs, and special bosses using Build Up (in Architect and certain missions). These things tend to completely overpower defense, and since SR has insignificant layering, huge damage pours in fast. The scaling resistances cut in to slow it, but they really work better in normal (non-to-hit-buffed) combat, because resistance allows some damage in, and since the scaling resistances cut in when life is very low, when every attack hits, even the reduced damage getting in is almost always fatal.

But how to make these things less dangerous (i.e., not an immediate death sentence) without totally removing their effectiveness?

Just giving SR more resistance seems like a cop-out. It's already going to get a little bit of resistance (along with everyone else) with the I24 IO changes.

I propose that scaling defense be added to the scaling resistances. I hope I can explain clearly.

Under normal (non-to-hit-buffed) circumstances, a high-defense character can in theory get a lot of use out of the scaling resistances, because the hits are still fairly infrequent, allowing the resistances to buy the player some time to react.

Scaling defense, one's defense numbers climbing as one's life bar drops, would provide little help in these normal circumstances, thus not making the character unbalanced/invincible. When you're soft-capped, more defense is (normally) literally no help at all.

But that changes when the enemy is to-hit-buffed. The buffs would allow the enemy to hit the SR character easily, quickly putting some damage on the character...but then as the life bar dropped, the otherwise-superfluous scaling defense would pile up. If set at the right values, this defense could progressively offset big to-hit buffs, slowing the character's decline enough to make the fight interesting, without making the character immune to harm. Randomly-occuring spikes of damage could still kill the character outright (health being low at this point), but the point is, it would now require spikes of good to-hit rolls, it wouldn't be "everything hits and down you go."

You can kind of do something like this now if you slot Elude, but I get the impression a lot of these to-hit buffs are way stronger than Elude can counter. Plus, Elude is a fixed number, and can contribute to the binary state problem of being invincible or dead. Scaling numbers might help instead (or alongside Elude). Of course the exact numbers would be up to the Devs to set.

I was thinking about this just last night. There are several considerations.

For starters. can't use Shield with a two-handed weapon set. Also, it has a minimal-fx option, unlike Ice or Electric, for example.

Storm is a particularly good set in a life-and-death crisis. Its weakness (the scatter/chaos) only really affects the offensive output of an orderly team. Once the team's focus turns toward staying alive, the chaos isn't so much of a penalty, and Storm is better than the soft cap at keeping people alive. (I say "better than" because it has knockback and ragdoll and -range and -recharge to go with the to-hit debuff, making it more effective than just floored to-hit.)

Aha! I wondered about that -- the Overwhelming Force pieces I put into storage sort themselves into separate stacks (presumably by level), so I'll see three or four stacks of the Acc/Dmg piece, for example, but the regular Archetype ATOs all stack together (if they're the same piece) as if they're all the same level.

Is this behavior of Overwhelming Force indeed just a bug? It's certainly...weird. Are they supposed to have "levels?"