Samuel_Tow

Err... Do you have any idea how many MORE things are resistant to Fear than are resistant to Stun? Anything robotic is, typically. Also, what I said was Cloak of Fear stacks with Touch of Fear, e.i. Dark Armour works well with Dark Melee. Oppressive Gloom stacks with Cobra Strike, Fault, Lightning Clap, Hand Clap, Stun/Total Focus and Clobber, e.i. Dark Armour works well with Martial Arts, Stone Melee, Electrical Melee, Super Strength, Energy Melee and War Mace. It works with more things via Oppressive Gloom than via Cloak of Fear. Oppressive Gloom's situational benefits outweigh those of Cloak of Fear's. Even if you count extremely minor enemy scatter (which, from experience, I wouldn't) that's still not enough to make up for the cost, unreliability and lack of primary mesh.

Actually, that's per tick, not per second. The power ticks once every two seconds, so that's more like 30 DPS of self-damage. And as for your actual question, well... Dark Regeneration heals 401.586 points of damage, call it 400, per target affected, capping at 10 targets. That's a full heal off three enemies. A Scrapper at level 50 has 1338.6 hit points, call it 1300, which means that off the 10 enemies draining you, each use will be full health. Dark Regeneration recharges in 30 seconds, which brigs us to about 43 points of regeneration per second of use. Natural regeneration is full health in 240 seconds, which means you regenerate another 5-6 points per second anyway. Together, they more than outpace the self-damage from Oppressive Gloom just from doing nothing.

I had it calculated somewhere at some point that an average spawn of five even con minions are going to deal about 200-220 DPS on your just between them. I would consider 30 more to be largely meaningless, especially considering that 30 DPS you're self-inflicting means, by and large, that you are taking exactly ZERO damage from these five minions. Yeah, if they're Jaegers, maybe that won't work, but ourside the very few corner cases of stun-resistant minions, you are expending almost nothing while buying yourself almost complete mitigation. In a set with 7 toggles, that means a lot.

Yes, and you don't use Cobra Strike on Night Widows, the Anathema, Zeust Titans, etc, but that doesn't make it worse than Touch of Fear against... Zeus Titans, the Anathema, Mech Men, etc. Each power has its uses. Quoting an extreme corner case and citing the difference in utility, while perfectly true, is also perfectly meaningless. It's like saying you turn off Super Jump when you fight, therefore it must be worse than Combat Jumping. No, it's just useful in different situations. And, again, I can count the situations where Oppressive Gloom is unusable on the fingers of one hand. I don't consider taking a whole other power and 6-slotting it just for those extremely rare situations where Oppressive Gloom isn't working to be worth it.

I'm aware of your choice of terminology, but again, you're shooting for only part of the whole. Stealth powers very much do have their uses for Brutes, and even Tankers, because Brutes, and even Tankers do more than just tank, and they sometimes even solo, surprisingly. If you want to fill a specific subset role of your choosing, then that's fine, but finding a power inappropriate for that one specific role doesn't really justify the argument that this power is generally bad. It's not useful for that one role you have in mind, but then that one role isn't all you can do with the AT. And I'm not even talking about aberrations like Offenders and petless Masterminds. A Brute can indeed choose to tank, for which a stealth power may or may not be appropriate. A Brute may also choose to deal damage, for which a stealth power is perfectly useful.

Been there, done that. I've tried a Thugs/Dark Mastermind, and he's capable of debuffing his enemies into the toilet before they can even think about touching his thugs. I've taken a Mercs/Traps to 50. He can both buff his henchmen considerably and debuff the enemies into bunny rabbits. I've tried a Nercomancy/Dark Mastermind, and he's not only good at debuffing, but has enough damage output to put a Scrapper to shame. Friend of mine played a Bots/Poison Mastermind and kept complaining nothing could kill him as he soloed AVs. I've literally and figuratively fallen asleep at the keybaord and, outside of the few specific enemies who hurt Masterminds pretty bad, never had a problem surviving, or indeed filling in for much of the rest of the team.

I'm saying Masterminds are tanks because every single combo can tank. Some do it on auto-pilot, others have to try, but they can all manage it if the Mastermind has his game on.

That's also something that comes straight out of the mouths of the developers - Masterminds were intended to be the Tanker counterpart of City of Villains. They've been careful not to claim that's what they ended up being, but they've never denied that's what they were envisioned and originally designed as.

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As far as stealth suppression goes, there is a simple rule as far as I can tell - stealth powers in melee defence sets never suppress, all other stealth powers suppress. Except Hide, which also suppresses, despite being in a melee defence set. Stealth powers which suppress lose half to 2/3 of their defence and lose all of their stealth radius. Stealth powers that do not suppress lose nothing.

A difference needs to be made between your stealth suppressing, and enemies being able to see you. Stealth, as a mechanic, reduces enemy sight radius, so you can get closer to enemies before they spot you. After an enemy has aggroed on you, however, stealth is irrelevant, because they don't need to see you to know where you are and attack you. It seems as though Cloak of Darkness/Energy Cloak suppress, because enemies aggroed on you will see you through them, but enemies NOT aggroed on will not. This allows you to fight in greater proximity to unaggroed spawns in safety, and as such allows you greater mobility. Cloaking Device, on the other hand, kills your stealth as soon as it suppresses, so not only will the spawn you attacked aggro on you, but so will neighbouring spawns which can now see you from farther away.

In either case, it doesn't matter much to a tank. Enemies who have already registered the tank's presence will ignore stealth anyway. All a tank needs to do is act and announce his presence, and enemies will shift focus to him. Either way, for a tank to truly be in control, he has to have taunt effects on the enemies, and once you have those, stealth radius is irrelevant.

You meet a Voltaic Tank. Which damage type would you use against him? I wouldn't know, since I don't remember, but since Crey Tanks have different resistances from Crey Protectors, who have different resistances from agents and security guards, who have different resistances from scientists, who have different resistances from Paragon Protectors. I guess I could could cycle my damage types on them and try to figure it out on the spot, but with virtually every type of enemy in a lot of enemy factions having a different set, it's purely impractical to trial-and-error it every time, and it's even harder to remember them.

And keep in mind, on your average team you could fight Crey, then Malta, then Carnies, then Rikti, then Circle of Thonrs, then Soldiers of Rularuu, then Rikti again and so on and so forth. It's easy to remember who is resistant to what status effect, because barely anyone ever is. It's not as easy to remember which of the eight damage types each of the literally thousands of NPCs you meet is weak and strong against.

Stealth suppresses. End of story. Play the tank, take the lead, land the first strike and you are first on the hit list of all enemies that matter. Why is that so hard to accept? Is direct line of sight the only way tanks can tank? A real, actual Tanker has Taunt, a Taunt aura and Gauntlet, to say nothing of the ability to be proactive and do his job. Something is shooting at your friends? PUNCH IT! That's all it takes. Stealth or no stealth.

You say that as though the stealth on any AT does anything else. Unless you want to argue that stealth as an overall mechanic is useless (everything you affect sees you and you cannot hide from it), then simply avoid trying to claim stealth on a Tank is any more or less useful than stealth on a Blaster or stealth on a Scrapper. Stealth's only uses, Hide notwithstanding (as that's not merely stealth) is to avoid trouble until you are ready to cause trouble. If you have a team who can't keep their pants on and rush ahead of the tank all the time, that's their problem.

Utter nonsense. Brutes are no more tanks than Scrappers. Masterminds are, when played right, more sturdy than Brutes. Even though many Mastermind players forget this, a Mastermind has a secondary, which is very heavy support. A Forcefields Mastermind can give enough defence to his henchmen to put a SR Brute to shame, and if he stacks that on top of Robotics, he can soft-cap his henchmen. A Henchman killed is easily resummoned and reupgraded. Henchmen also have a rather high threat rating and tend to catch the attention of NPCs a lot.

Or, you know, NO-ONE could tank. This nonsense about needing a tank, healer and damage dealer plain and simply isn't needed in City of Heroes, and ESPECIALLY in City of Villains. All of the CoV ATs are made to be self-sufficient to a large extent. They can all deal damage, they can all take care of themselves, they can all contribute. Trying to reduce one to "tank" only serves to neuter that AT's other capacities. Brutes deal damage. A LOT of damage. Trying to sell them as tanks is a bad move.

You're wrong on both accounts. First of all, Fear only breaks once every five seconds. More importantly, though, no, Cloak of Fear does not stack itself on bosses. It does not stack with itself at all. Check City of Data and you'll see each of the effects has "Effect does not stack from same caster" appended. Even if you can get two ticks to overlap with each other (which may be doable) you'll only have the second simply override the first.

If things are immune, turn the toggle off. The damage per enemy is laughable. 6.26 points total, capping at 10 targets for a little over 60 points of damage at level 50. Something as simple as a single Jaeger will hit you for upwards of 100 on a single attack, and being surrounded by 10 would cost you far, far, FAR more in attacks than the toggle will ever cost you to run. And unlike Cloak of Fear, attacking your enemies does not break the effect. Furthermore, unlike Cloak of Fear, which has some of the game's WORST accuracy (0.67 base, which you cannot get to decent levels at all), Oppressive Gloom has standard 1.0 accuracy, which means that even with a single enhancement, you're going to hit just about everything every time, and only fail to affect the exceedingly few things that are resistant to it. And if you're anything aside from Dark Melee, you have a better chance of being able to stack-stun bosses with it. Super Strength, Stone Melee, Energy Melee, War Mace and Martial Arts each have access to an in-set stun, whereas only Dark Melee has access to an in-set Fear. And even THAT has such a duration-to-recharge ratio that you can out and out stack it with itself.

Cloak of Fear does less, costs more, is all but incompatible with Oppressive Gloom, and has only one, single benefit over it - enemies don't wander. Which doesn't really matter all that much in the long run.

This is complete nonsense. If they didn't intend to balance powers as they are balanced now, they wouldn't have balanced them like this. It's like filing a lottery ticket, not getting the right numbers and calling it a bug. Or like one day realising that you don't like half the songs in your playlist any more and calling that a bug. Things change. Problems come to light. Opinions shift. It's hypocritical to use hindsight to use completely intentional, working-as-intended decisions at the time "bugs." This isn't maintenance, it's continual development. Unless you want to suggest that the game could have been made perfect but wasn't, and all the development since April 2004 has been fixing mistakes made in development, this is nothing but nonsense.

You can feel free to share your opinions and point out problems with powers as you see them. Just as I'm free to disagree with your opinion on the matter. I would advise you, however, to stop just shy of passing your opinion off as fact.

Except you'll still be dealing LETHAL damage, e.i. cutting damage. Explain to me how you cut with a club.

That's a load of nonsense. Are you saying that so much as nicking a person means killing them? Real life doesn't work that way. You can't just stick a knife anywhere into a person and expect them to expire like they would in, say, in the Green Beret video game. You either have to apply SIGNIFICANT force, hit the right place, or stab enough times to where your victim dies of simple blood loss quickly. Or are we suddenly suggesting that "any injury" equals "killing?"

If I shoot a guy in both shoulders and both legs, he's useless, but he's still very much alive. If I slice through a guy's triceps, his whole hand is next to useless. It's injury, yes. Sometimes even severe injury. But it's not killing, not if your super abilities allow you to pull that off correctly. Are we going to claim that punching people doesn't injure them? Hit someone hard enough to knock them out, and you're likely to cause damage that's MORE life-threatening than a gunshot wound to the leg, but is it more acceptable because it LOOKS less bloody?

In fact, this is entirely how police officers are trained to respond to threat - via escalating force. Police officers don't shoot for the head at the first sign of trouble, and I'm fairly certain any policeman who does is facing some serious disciplinary action. Verbal warning first, if those don't work then limb shots, and only in extreme situations should they resort to body shots, the idea being to try and stop the person without killing him.

This whole idea that you have to stop villains without so much as hurting them is silly. As long as he lives, he'll have to deal with broken bones, gunshot wounds, cuts and bruises.

Yeah, that's the other big thing. You need a whole arsenal to truly exploit a weakness. Just one or two powers won't cut it. Assault Rifle Blasters can sort of get around lethal damage resistance via Flamethrower and Ignite, but the effect of this is extremely limited, because they're just two powers, and not the set's very most powerful, either. And, if we give each power its own damage mod, then what if your "heavy hitter" is fire and your low-damage control is ice? What do you do against a demon resistant to fire and weak to cold, then? Even HAVING the power doesn't mean it'll be very useful if it doesn't do enough damage.

The reason I brought this up was that we discussed something like that in one of the Dual Handguns powerset proposals back when the set was first announced. An idea that you could have a whole set doing all Lethal damage, but that you could replace a lot of that with elemental damage. I believe back then I was thinking an extra fire or an extra energy component. That way you'd have a full set of attacks, all keyed to the element that your enemy is most vulnerable to.

Even with such a setup, however, it's still not a very good plan. The thing is, the game is clearly biassed against certain damage types and highly vulnerable to others. Lethal gets the short end of the stick, with every hard target being resistant to it, while Dark is actually quite rarely resisted outside of Spectral Demons and Husks. The game's enemies, in fact, are not balanced around having variable damage types, as not many of them actually have meaningful strengths and weaknesses. And even if they did, exploiting them requires that you KNOW what those strengths and weaknesses are. Even if you have Surveillance, that doesn't actually help too much, because Surveillance is on a 20-second recharge and checks only one enemy. Each enemy faction has a variety of members, often each with their own unique resistances. Checking each before combat is unworkable, and remembering each is VERY difficult.

If the game were simpler in that regard, or had vulnerabilities that were easier to infer, that might have been a good idea. Right now, though, it's more work to actually use than it's worth.

I was wondering how to combine them! /em rollingfacedesk it is!

I haven't gotten Psychic Blast high enough to tell (only 20, I think), but I know Assault Rifle suffers from this BIG TIME. With only two real single-target attacks and a spawn, just about every boss, and every boss resistant to lethal in particular, is a PAIN. As well, the set excels at AoE damage of a magnitude that a solo Blaster isn't likely to survive the return fire from. Trust me, I've tried. On a team, it's fire and forget. I can fall asleep on my attack key and my team will love me because of the ludicrous damage output over AoE. Solo, though, that AoE doesn't get as much mileage, and the lack of serious killing speed REALLY hurts.

That's as compared to, say, a Fire Blaster who can outright kill in the blink of an eye, or an Ice Blaster, who can both deal upfront damage AND leverage much stronger control. Assault Rifle just lags behind in solo potential, and that shows.

I believe the idea was for this to be an "Everything Blast." I can't exactly disagree with the general premise, because a set which switches damage types on the fly can be interesting. I kind of question the ability to design one, because you'd have to pick one element to be the strongest to nuke with. More than that, the merit of having different damage types available to you, while interesting, isn't actually something that's terribly useful. Even with good, long-term knowledge of the game, few people would know what to do with their powers, what is weak to what, what is strong to what and so on. There is no good reference material for this. You can sort of draw from Red Tomax, but only if you know each faction's system name, and powers like Surveillance and the Power Analyser aren't very common.

All in all, in a few instances, multiple damage types can be a boon. A lot of the time, though, people don't know when these instances are, and there's no good way to check, or indeed remember. And, what's more, a multiple-damage-type set would be a lot more interesting with the ability to switch damage types on all attacks, not just have one attack be one and the other another.

That's actually explained, or at least mentioned. It's the same way you can "phone home" from the Shadow Shard. In the case of the 'Shard, you phone Firebase Zulu, who route the call back to Portal Corp through the portal. In Cimerora, I believe Montague or the Senator explained that they has some inexplicable magical means of communicating, which I would assume routes back to the midnighters' club and from there into the city phone lines. It's forced, but it's also more convenient than it is immersion-breaking.

Far as I'm concerned, a "Jump Bot" is in the same vein as a "jump jet." They don't specifically JUMP, they just have some limited ability to fly which is easier to sell as a "Jump Bot," rather than as a "Bot which can fly, kind of, but for short periods of time and with some other limitations." That'd be kind of hard to fit on top a target box.

They have jet packs on their backs. They fly, even if their info says otherwise.

It's subjective, but not unpredictable. IF you know the DPS of each of your powers and also know, on average, how long you let it lapse, you can still get a good estimate as to what DPS you're actually getting out of your attacks with your own playstyle. If you have a calculated, optimized attack chain, then you can actually predict that with quite a bit of certainty, though circumstances will, obviously, always skew results.

Each attack has a cycle, which is how long it takes for it to animate and recharge, so that it can be used again. Not all attacks are often used with that cycle, however, as animation time is a big factor in City of Heroes, and you plain aren't always able to activate attacks as they recharge. From experience, I can say that, by and large, long-recharge, high-damage attacks usually get used close to, if not exactly to their cycle. They spend a considerably longer time recharging than they do animating, so it both feels natural and makes sense. Small attacks, on average, get used when big attacks aren't available, or when a low-health enemy needs to be chipped to death where a big attack would be a waste of energy.

As such, specific playstyle preferences notwithstanding, you can assume that the theoretical DPS of big attacks is likely to be close to reality, whereas the theoretical DPS on small attacks is likely to be markedly smaller, unless you specifically opt to use them as much as possible. If I had to guess, I'd say that's why larger attacks are balanced with recharge such that their DPS is lower. It may be lower, but they get used closer to their actual DPS than the smaller attacks with a higher DPS, which tends to even things out on average.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not a fan of Blaster sets that are even MORE team-inclined. Almost all meaningful problems a Blaster can face all but go away on a team if you keep your head in the game, which is, looked at inversely, penalty enough for not playing on a team. Having a set that is even WORSE at solo for the benefit of being better on a team isn't something I can get behind.

I have to say the above, posted right after a dev post mentioning the exact thing in question, has got to be some of the meanest irony I've seen in years. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just one of those instances when the universe as a whole simply turns around and moons you

Well, you can still give me reputation and it'll show up in my User CP. I check that regularly. It just won't show up next to my posts, but it's the comments I enjoy more than the points, themselves, anyway

To be fair, if this is anything like CoV Beta, it won't be a full-time job. Back then, we only got the servers up for a few hours a day, not every day. And even then, for me it was usually 1 AM to around 5 AM or some such.

Many men are insecure idiots who feel threatened by a woman who doesn't fit their narrow-minded view of what a woman should be. If a woman ends up being outgoing, shares their interests and acts like one of them, even a little, they feel their masculinity threatened, and could resort to all manner of stupidity to try to preserve it, denying the truth being the most readily available. I've met a few of those, myself, both online and in real life, and I was never charmed. I wouldn't fault you for quitting a team with such people on it.

And I have to agree with you in general. It's good form to address people however they wish to be addressed. I generally don't care what the gender of people I play with is, as the things for which gender matters rarely occur over the 'net, and mentions of it come up equally rarely. For that reason, addressing a person by the gender of their characters is usually a solid fall-back when you have no other information to work with.

*edit*
There is this misconception that women don't play female characters, so meeting one who does can cause some men's brains to crash and reboot.

It doesn't need to be another to-hit check, per se, but the tools required to defeat evasion overlap with the tools required to defeat deflection only tangentially. Having armour piercing rounds makes no difference in how easy it is to hit something, for instance, and being a good shot is only marginally useful against the human equivalent of a main battle tank. Yes, you can aim for the weak points, sort of, but that's by far the less effective method.

The only reason I say "a separate system" is because it's difficult for me to envision a unified system handling those in such a way as to make sense practically. As others have mentioned, it's a lot like how uniform holds are. Controlling someone's mind, freezing them in a block of ice, choking them with smoke, sending them into seizures with electricity and so on count for the same thing, even though thematically, they shouldn't be. But I wouldn't make an argument for or against it, because holds are far too diverse and far too difficult to account for more specifically. I don't, however, enjoy such thematically different and monolithic concepts being treated as some kind of common middle ground.

In Arcanum, a friend of mine managed to score a critical miss, causing him to slice his head clean off with a small dagger. In a single slice, no less. Neither of us, to this day, has any idea how that was supposed to work.

In English, "it" is a pronoun reserved for inanimate objects or sufficiently non-sympathetic animals. However, the "third gender" is not always the same in all languages. In mine, for instance, it's called a middle gender, and is used to refer to nouns ending in a few specific pronouns, usually reserved either for something small, something insignificant or something strange, or just for random things my ancestors decided were a "middle gender." Like bicycle, lake, button an so on. And, yes, even child. So, my gut instinct is to say the same thing in English - it, the child.

On the one hand, English's lack of a STRONG gender-neutral pronoun makes it hard to talk about people in general, not one gender in specific. On the other hand, it also makes it hard to talk about small animals without either demeaning them into objects, or checking out to see if it's a boy or a girl. In my language, for instance, a dog is always an "it." In English, a grown-up adult dog is usually referred to as either he or she, which is kind of confusing if you're addressing someone else's dog.

I'm not sure I'm too hot on Crimson Sky and Iron Stitch, but I can't say I have anything against them. I have to say, though, that I LOVE Rain of Spears I don't why that is, just the way it sounds and the mental image it invokes is priceless. It also seems to be one of the simpler names, despite being long. Either way, I can live with the names without complaint.

Well, and keep in mind I'm making things up as I go along, I would expect a large spear to create quite serious, large open wounds on each strike, cutting protection out of the way. Subsequent hits can, therefore, hit this exposed weakness and do extra damage. I mean it's not ideal, but it doesn't have to be.

Oh, I agree with you. It's just that this notion that hitting people is any less deadly than shooting them, while OBVIOUSLY true in real life, doesn't really hold water in City of Heroes. If a player can claim a hero pulls his punches and doesn't cave in the skulls of people even though he can punch through concrete, why is it such a stretch to think that a swordsman or a gunslinger isn't able to pull his punches and shoot to incapacitate, rather than kill?

It's often surprising how, in fiction, all metals are magnetic. No exception. If it's metal, you can stick a magnet to it, and Magneto can tie it into knots. It doesn't matter what the metal actually is, because all metals are apparently magnetic. Which, as any kid who's taken a magnet outside the house will tell you, isn't true. The dang thing doesn't stick to half the metals out there!