Sasqu

Hi all,

Old player returning here and I was wondering if there were any all rad or all corruptor VGs on Union? I used to play in one (except made up of defenders) back in the old days on the US servers and it was a lot of fun and made for a nice change of pace. After all who doesn't like dozens of stacked buffs and debuffs? It probably wouldn't be for my main character if that makes a difference to anyone. I'm assuming it wouldn't though..

just an update to say that the patch notes have been updated now and glacial and ice shield definetely do give positional defences. Excellent news for anyone using Cold Domination.. although makes power choices even trickier!

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Or: Take stamina. In which case the most leave outable power is Poison Gas arrow. I would leave it out anyway.


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Out of interest why choose poison gas arrow to leave out? It's main affect is -dmg, which is the equivalent of having resitance to everything. Personally I'd have though that's one of the better powers in the set. Stacks nicely with any other -dmg powers, any +res powers and it's aoe. It's a great power...

If you mean confirmed as in the ice shields now have positional defence then no. If you mean confirmed that positional def only stacks with positional and typed only stacks with the same type, then yes. It used to work differently (different damage type defences stacked) a long time ago but it's been like it is now for quite awhile.

Turned up a useful post on the US boards that explains it all much better than I can. How defence works

no the same shield wouldn't stack with itself, shields only stack with other shields of the same type. So a ranged lethal attack doesn't check against the range def of the glacial shield + the lethal def of the ice shield. It just uses whichever of the two is higher.

As I understand it every attack has two components, the damage type (lethal, smashing, energy, e.t.c) and the attack type (range, aoe, melee). Defense shields only stack with the same type of shield. So if you team with an EA brute who's running Kinetic Shield and you Ice Shield him, they'll stack as both provide defence to smash/lethal. Assuming something like 11.5 def from ice and 12 def from kinetic the brute would have 22.5 defence to all smashing and lethal attacks (without any enhancements). Which was all well and good, however the old Ice shield provided no def based on the attack type, which meant ATs like Ninjitsu stalkers gained no benefit from them as their defences were all positional and based on the attack type rather than the damage type. Ice gives 11.5 def against lethal, Ninja Reflexes gives 13.8 against melee - end result? The stalkers still got 13.8 def against any melee attacks, so no real change then.

Now though, with the new and improved Ice shield that actually provide positional defence that's no longer the case, you'll be able to stack defences on any set. It's a fairly major change and I'm just a bit suprised it's not really been mentioned. No patch notes that I've found, no dev comments on it, it just seems a little odd.

Plus the new change arguably makes glacial the better of the two shield now, where as before it was always ice that was recommended. With Cold Domination you ought to be able to stay at range which means glacial will protect your team-mates from everything. Around 20% def to everything! That's massive, so I don't understand why nobody's talking about it? Unless there's something I'm missing anyways, I've been away a long time so perhaps I'm not up to speed on recent changes..

I see the description for Ice Shield and Glacial Shield have been updated to say that Ice protects against melee (as well as lethal/smash/fire) and Glacial protects against Ranged/AoE (plus energy neg energy). Anyone know if it's actually true? In theory obviously the descriptions would be gospel, but I think we all know that's not necessarily true.

melee/ranged/aoe would mean +def for absolutely everything wouldn't it? Psionic, Toxic, whatever other poorly defended powers are out there all fall within one of those areas so that must make the shields massively more useful?