Samuel_Tow

Ok, having scanned her, I can see why she "cheats." The Madame of Mystery has 65% resistance to absolutely everything, which counteracts her 20% vulnerability to Lethal damage by a large margin. She is also 75% resistant to all kinds of debuffs and regenerates 20 hit points per second. I'm... Not sure what kind of logic gave birth to that design, but I'm determined to try my luck anyway. Will let you know how it goes.

*edit*

OK, that was A PAIN! Who the hell designed this battle? Freakazoid? The Madame of Mystery cheats on every conceivable level by being virtually unkillable AND having massive outgoing PSI damage AND that damn Mask of Vitiation! Yeah, I was given a power that was supposed to help kill her, and to be honest, I think that was the only reason I actually beat her, but even then I consider it a massive cheat. Oh, and she drained my endurance when she died, too. Lovely.

Here's the setup - I died twice. Yeah, once clearing up the enemies around her so they wouldn't interfere, then another time as I fought her. Oh, wait, I died a third time on another attempt against her because apparently I didn't bring enough purples. I should also point out in big bold letters that THIS WAS A -1 ELITE BOSS. I'm not sure I'd have even stood a chance of she were my level or, heaven forbid, higher. She is, in all honesty, stronger than Vanessa DeVore, which makes no sense at all. But beyond the deaths, here's what I brought to bear.

A level 45 Fire/Fire Blaster, with a full inspirations tray. Four greens, two of which I used, four blues, two of which I used, two break-frees that I didn't need, two reds which I used, and eight purples that I used in sequences of four. Beyond that, I used Hasten and that special power that's meant to hurt her. I used Hasten probably 10-20 seconds into the fight, as it was still recharging from the first fight, and I put the special power on auto. I noticed that she wasn't resisting it, so the power was doing around 310 damage per application, whereas my Blaze that should have been doing more was doing around 100.

I did beat the Madame of Mystery, though I did so with pretty much two or three powers. Not counting Aim and Build Up, I basically cycled Flares and Blaze inbetween auto-shots of the special power. I've done some numbers of Fire Blast, and Flares actually has the highest sustained DPS of the set, so I stuck with that. I lost my notes since then, so I don't know how Blaze compares, but I remember it being pretty good, so I stuck to that, too. That's... Pretty much all I ever used on her, aside from a few instances of Greater Fire Sword, but that actually has pretty low DPS. On the other hand, I should probably have been looking at DPA, since this Blaster has enough attacks to string up three attack chains at the same time. Oh, well, hindsight is always 20/20.

Basically, my battle went as follows: I used up the two reds and four of my purples and went to town on her. She wasn't actually hitting me, but her health barely moved. With Aim and Build Up, I did what damage I could, then put the special power on auto and let it fire pretty much as soon as it was ready. I used Hasten, which may or may not have made it recharge faster, but it was a 300-damage power on a 6-second recharge, which just by itself would have given me 50 DPS on her, or over twice her recharge, but I still filled up the gaps with other things just so I could do this before my shields ran out. And they did. When the first four purples started blinking, I used the rest. At one point, she nailed me with Telekinetic Thrust for something like 3/4 of my health, which is where the two greens went, and at another point, I was just running myself dry not running any toggles (no Stamina on this one), so I had to fill up the bar. Luckily, I had all medium blues, so two topped me off. She managed to immobilized me a couple of times, but only for something like a second, and I didn't notice those dealing much damage.

I literally beat her with moments to spare, as I've seen what she does to me when my shields run out - she basically two-shots me before I can react. So with my last purples blinking, I poured on all my attacks, hit her with the special power and queued up Inferno "just to make sure," but anti-climatically, she died from the special power and my Inferno fired off into the distance. On the plus side, it didn't drain all my endurance, but I'd still have seen it as a cooler end if I'd ended on that. The power is tagged at 896 damage in its info tab (I know that's an average) so even with 75% damage resistance, it would still have done enough to finish her off, but it is what it is.

She's dead now, and I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do against her with any other character, Blaster, Scrapper or otherwise. The sheer DPS I have to bring to bear against her is obscene, especially against someone with her offensive capabilities. I fought her while basically immune from her offence and I STILL barely managed, let alone if I'd had to fight her AND resist her psi crap and her Mask of Vititation. I did it, but... I'm not happy with this design.

You know... In just the vein of this thread, I ran across a pretty curious suggestion over at Suggestions, and I apologise for cross-posting, but here it is.

What I took from this suggestion was a pretty... Interesting approach to giving support specialists some eccentric offensive potential, namely by allowing their ally-only powers to be used on enemies in return for negative effects. So a heal becomes a harm power, obviously doing a lot less damage than it can heal just because heals are typically so strong. A fire shield cast on an enemy would debuff and burn, an ice shield cast on an enemy would slow and so forth. And, heck, we can even retcon a protection bubble that pushes things out into an inside-out bubble that sucks things in, thereby making the target easier to hit

Granted, this sort of muddies the water between Dark Miasma and... Pretty much everything else, in that Dark Miasma powers are already enemy-target debuffs, and appending ally-targeted buffs might be... Weird. But, hey, if you can heal people with poison and protect them by setting them on fire, why can't you protect them by bathing them in EEEEEVIL darkness?

Balance, obviously, comes into play, but this WOULD actually solve a personal pet peeve I have with support powersets in general, which is that a lot of their powers are useless if you don't have a team-mate to cast it on. I mean COMPLETELY useless, in that you can't even activate them. An ally-targeted heal isn't usable on yourself, isn't usable on enemies, and isn't usable at all if you don't have an ally around. Being able to instead use it to "heal" an enemy strikes me as a decent compromise.

This also adds an interesting layer over how to build such a character. It's scientific fact that if a power has too many things to slot for and you try to slot for everything, you will not be able to really slot for anything in a meaningful way, so this gives us a choice between slotting the things for defence and slotting them for offence. Or, to use a system that isn't as popular as it should be, to have two builds - one for offence, one for defence.

Granted, I gave this exactly five minutes of genuine thought when I practically stole it from the original suggester, but at the very least, it's a decent point if just as an abstract concept.

Hmm... You know, this is a pretty interesting concept, I have to say. It'd give support abilities an offensive role if the wielder so chose to use them. And if you give a heal both healing and damage, it becomes a question of what you want to slot for, as if you try to slot for everything, everything will suck. This could possibly work well with dual builds as a "solo vs. team" build, and it'd give support characters some decent fighting prowess.

Now we just need to figure out what we do about buff/debuffs and how we treat buffing one's self, and we're golden

Hmm... Heal Other turns into Harm Other. Protection bubbles turn into acceleration bubbles, fire shields start burning their targets and ice shields actually freeze them in place. I like it

As it usually comes down in these cases, Arcana is right. This time around, in a purely technical sense, and via specific definitions. As an offensive benefit, as defined as a a benefit to offence over time, Build Up's contribution isn't great. Just going off base numbers and forgetfully ignoring animation times so I don't have to break out the calculator, it has a 10 second buff at a 90 second recharge, which gives you a coverage of 1/9 of the time. A 100% damage buff 1/9 of the time is equivalent, perfect conditions present, to a 100/9 ~ 11.11% constant damage buff. Red Tomax lists Assault at 10.5% damage buff, and being a toggle, it is constant, hence Arcana's comparison of Build Up to Assault. I'm likely missing something, as recharge would boost that percentage significantly, but even so, that's where the "not much of an offensive benefit" argument comes in.

As for the "defensive benefit" argument, this depends on context. When I exposited that even though Build Up's over-time benefit may be low, its true benefit is burst damage, allowing me to kill things before they killed me. On a purely technical level, that IS a defensive benefit, as it helps keep me from dying. This particular aspect is also not an offensive benefit, as perfect conditions permitting, clumping damage in bursts is equivalent to spreading it over a longer period of time, hence it does not benefit offence for damage to be focused over damage being spread over time. Build Up IS an offensive benefit, but within the context I provided and within which Arcana commented, it is effect of burst damage IS defensive.

That's all well and good in theory and in numbers, and to this extent I completely agree. However, as you may have noticed, I requested perfect conditions several time. By this I mean conditions where attacks follow a certain pattern where momentary damage can be expanded over time and over-time damage can be calculated as burst without loss of generality. In actual practice, this is never the case, which is why statistics in general and CoH numbers in particular should always be regarded more as a guideline than as a natural law. Specifically, "over time" metrics assume constant action, as gaps in the timeline skew many things. For instance, having to go to the loo cuts your damage output, reducing your expected DPS over a longer period of time, but it does not prevent your regeneration, recovery and, most importantly, recharge, which plays havoc on "over time" metrics.

As a general rule of thumb, the longer the period you try to forecast over, the more likely it is for chaotic, unpredictable events to skew numbers so much that expected calculations lose any and all meaning. Such is the case with Build Up, at least as far as my own experience goes, as my gameplay is designed to capitalise on that. Anything I need to do, I put off until AFTER I've used Aim and Build Up and have finished the fight, such that any events which would otherwise delay me affect their delay while Aim and Build Up are recharging, effectively giving them a shorter practical recharge, in that they take less of the time which actually matters to recharge. It's like watching a movie where something is said to take 10 years, but then we cut to "Ten years later..." It WAS ten years, but since only interesting events matter, for us it was a few minutes.

It's a bit difficult to explain, really, but while I believe Arcana is technically right, I don't believe that stance reflects practical reality with enough accuracy.

Interesting...

On Pinnacle, a player put together a channel and began inviting people basically based on who was on at the time, and did so over several weeks, amassing a significant number of members. Since I first got into it, it has grown to be quite huge, and I see new people being added regularly, so someone must still be looking. That sort of thing seems to help people a lot, even though I tend to keep to myself most of the time.

Additionally, I got invited into a community recently, because apparently I made a good impression on someone (yeah, I was surprised, too), and since then I've seen the group grow, at least little by little. We'll hold scheduled events, but inevitably a stranger will come along when there are spots left empty. At one point, I witnessed an exchange between members that went like "Was <charname> a PuG?" "Yup." "Wow, he's not an idiot! Someone direct him to the website!" I'm not sure what became of this, to be honest, but that's generally the approach.

That said, this is player grouping run by player effort. It's kind of disappointing that, with the advent of Global chat, we didn't get any channels that spanned the whole server. Or rather, we didn't get USEFUL channels that spanned the whole server. We got Arena, which I removed after I realised it was syphoning my brain out of my skull, and Help, which isn't really the place to look for teams. We have Broadcast, but that is completely useless with how spread around players are, and Request, which is twice as useless since it's a completely redundant clone of Broadcast anyway. We have no means for a new player to take part in, or at the very least observe large player gatherings. Being that we lack any predictable place of congregation, we really need some kind of chat solution that doesn't have to be created and maintained by players and which serves to unite all people on a given server. Communication is key to breaking out of our cliques, as the Internet has aptly demonstrated, and the better and more easily we can communicate, the more alive everything feels.

That said, the most welcoming kind of game for me is one that doesn't bother me with needing other people, so...

Personally, not being American, I celebrate Independence Day on the 22nd of September. I have no real arguments against an American Independence Day, but to say that I, personally, see it as a waste of time.

Then again, I'm biassed, as I'm not a fan of events in general.

In other news, Ghost Widow:

I just faced her down with the same Fire/Fire/Pyre Blaster I talked about before, and despite all the horror stories I heard from people and despite the pain I've had with her CoV-side, the fight was actually a lot of fun. Tactics were even simpler this time around, since unlike Nosferatu, Ghost Widow didn't chase me around, and I didn't have to keep her away. She did have a whole team of support soldiers, but lacking Vengeance to boost the EB, I didn't hesitate to just waste them via collateral damage.

The pre-mission preparation was simple - four purples, two break-frees, some greens and some blues. I died a couple of times getting to her, though, and so used and collected a lot of inspirations, ending up with five small purples and three medium ones, ALL from drops inside the mission. That, and a single small red which I doubt made much of a difference.

I used four small purples and the red just before I attacked, together with Aim and Build Up, of course, opening with Fireball + Fire Breath + Rain of Fire + Combustion + Fire Sword Circle just to clean up everything but her, thou a couple of enemies escaped and I had to devote a Blaze to each a while down the line. I managed to consume enough endurance to make up what I'd spent on that AoE barrage from one lieutenant who ran away and Ghost Widow herself, but I didn't actually suffer much damage doing so.

The rest of the fight went in a fairly simple manner, with me basically cycling Rind of Fire, Flares, Fire Blast and Blaze, occasionally swinging around for a Fire Sword. I tried to hit her with Blazing Bolt, but DOT from something I'd done to her before killed her while it animated. At one point, my four purples ran out and I replaced them with a medium and a small purple as they were blinking, which carried me through to the end. I ended the fight with two medium purples left over, as well as all my greens, reds, blues and break-frees still intact.

Considering what I'm building this character to be, this turnout is EXACTLY what I wanted to see, and I enjoy it very much when the game plays out like this.

*edit*
You know... I'm level 42.2 now. I think I'll try Madeline Casey's To Save a Soul next and see about the Madame of Mystery. I've fought her several times, both as an AV and as an EB, and I don't remember her being anything too special. I make no promises what difficulty I'll play this at, however.