Screwloose

I know that Dark Armour has a reputation as a high End cost powerset, but I don’t see it that way myself.

The Resistance toggles seem to give good value for their end cost which seems similar to the end cost of other resistance and defense toggles.

Oppressive Gloom costs practically nothing in End or HP to run.

Cloak of Shadows doesn’t give huge defense for it’s cost, but the Stealth is useful enough that I hardly turn it off.

Death Shroud is cheap on a Damage per End measure so unless you are standing around burning a hole in the carpet you will be getting good value for it.

Cloak of Fear can be a bit expensive and easily underappreciated, but I started using it again and I think I am seeing a lot more misses when I turn it on. Also it is a debuff that helps your whole team so you could expect to be paying a bit more for it than something that just helps you.

Dark Regeneration does have a high base End cost, but will give a near 100% Heal if you have three critters near you. I had a load of fights in the last few days where I dragged it back from less than 10% HP remaining to a win because Dark Regen recharged.

I don’t think there is a Dark Armour Power that you can’t get decent results for your End with reasonable slotting of SOs and that seems to make it on a par with the other Secondaries, at least the ones I am familiar with.

The one power I haven’t mentioned is Soul Transfer. I have avoided it in the past, but with more power choices I have it at the moment and find it about 50/50. Half the time it saves me a trip back from the hospital and half the time it just doubles my debt. In a team situation where I am KO’ed early in the fight it might be giving more value, but I haven’t seen any good examples as yet.

As a set Dark Amour gives you good basic threat mitigation plus some interesting additional mitigation options plus some utility plus some added damage plus a good Woops button. And it gives you End Drain resistance.

While Dark Armour is not as straight forward a set to use as some others I struggle to see any area in which it needs major work.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Hi all

Another week another few purple recipe drops. Got my friends through the SSA and everyone was very happy and did it again solo with my Crab Spider who I have brought across to the Heroside.

When I was working on my Spines Dark Scrapper Respec on Mids I noticed that first there are now 5 powers in the Ancillary and Patron Power Pools and that some of the powers in the PPPs seem extra cheesy.

Cheesiest for a Dark Armour Scrapper would seem to be the Leviathian AE Stun attack. But I really like the look of the Soul Pool and it’s Click +Def power.

Does anyone know if I work my way over to the Villainside can I Respec to a Patron Pool or will I have to do the Patron Arc first?

I gave a few of my other Scrappers a run (MArts/SR, Claws/Dark, Dark/Regen) and they all went pretty well.

I have been crafting and selling recipe drops that I was going to make a profit on and am making more Inf than I have been spending on IO Sets, although I could have gone harder at getting IO sets on my characters.

Since I worked out that I have about seven level 50 characters that could benefit from some IO Set upgrades I have been doing the one Hero Merit for 5 Random Rares swap and distributing the ones I think I can use to each characters and crafting the rest for sale. Seems to be working fairly well so far.

The Team Sidekick/Mentor mechanic is becoming one of my favourite things. Makes getting a team together easy and means I can see how my old level 50s would play at various levels without having to level one up again.

Regards, Screwloose

Thanks for the info Exxar, I am not much of a farmer although it sounds like a good way to improve my rate of IO Set-ifying and if the missions are reasonably fun I don’t mind doing them regularly.

Took my Crab Spider out for a run last night and wow that AT kicks butt. Think I am going to bring him across to the Hero side as he will make a great team corner stone for playing with some of my friends. And he picked up another Purple IO recipe so a good start to the week.

I have had a hack at a Set IO build for my Spines Dark in Mids and I seem to have a pile of slots, did they change the number of slots we get? Only slight issue so far (besides affording it all) is I seem to be slotting a lot of sets that give a 9% Accuracy set bonus: Siroccos for PBAE, Positrons for Targets AE. Is it worth trying to use a different set or should I just slot them anyway?

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Hi all

This is turning into a bit of a blog but I thought I might keep it going see if it remains interesting.

I have been impressed with lots of little Quality of Life things as I have been playing. Been doing mostly Detective and Tip missions still, seems like the quality of writing has improved noticeably.

I have been impressed with the flexibility of the difficulty setting mechanisms. I am running my Spines Dark at 3 characters worth of equal level critters and it has been fun. Most times I don’t have to engage too much competence to take out a spawn, sometimes I have to make sure my good tricks land correctly and occasionally I have to go to the bottom of the bag of trick and I can be sent to the hospital.

I was concerned about getting my IO sets together but I seem to be getting a good rate of drops and making decent Inf. In about the last week I have had 3 of the Superior purple recipes drop so another week of that should set me up to trade them on the market to make a single whole set.

I tried a few things to generate some inf. Old trick of buying set recipes no one wanted for about 10% of their vendor value and selling them to a vendor got me 1 mil in short order but was pretty boring. I crafted and sold a bunch of the recipes I got as drops and lots of them sold, one for 100 mil. And I went back through all my old characters and cleared out their salvage and made about 350 mil, 200 mil of that on one piece. So I am about 3 Superior and 4 useful Orange recipes and 600 mil over the week. Another week of that should see me fairly well set for a big upgrade.

I have a couple of characters with a recipe for a Lost Healing Wand, which says it makes a device that heals Lost? What the heck is this, the only vague memory I have is that it could have been from the Crafting tutorial, or am I wrong, anyone know?

I have to make some apology to people I might have contended with last time I was here about KB resistance for Dark Armour scrappers. I bought and slotted a Karma KB resist Enh and the difference is nearly indescribable. So much so that I am thinking of doing the same for my Kheldian who is the other character I am mostly playing.

One thing on my list to get into is the SSA, any tips or advice? Do I need a group for any of it, should I turn my difficulty down a bit before I run it?

Hope everyone is having fun.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Thanks for the tip Valorin. Fortunately I am happy to keep going mostly as is at the moment so I can afford to build up some capital before I start spending, which is lucky cause some of this stuff is expensive (% . I did more of the IO set stuff with my Villains cause I was playing them more when the whole IO system came in so I grok the Frankensloting concept.

I really need to spend some time with a planner to get some idea what I can do now. Looks like slots are going to be the issue rather than powers, especially where I want to sneak an extra slot into something for an odd set IO.

I had a bit of luck already with a Respec recipe drop that sold immediately for 100mil. Nearly tripled my current savings in one sale (% .

Got a couple of other nice recipe drops and I am crafting and selling the ones that turn me a good profit. One of the things I like about the way CoH is set up now is that when I get a good recipe I can hold them fairly easily, either to use them myself or to sell them to finance other options.

Made myself a Recovery Serum temp power for giggles. Looking at the temp powers I am thinking that maybe some Stun Grenades would be good to go with OpGloom for particularly tough fights.

I started on the Incarnate plotline, the map for the Trapdoor mission was a bit nasty. Kind of put that arc on hold as my friends decided they want to do it as a group. But glad I didn’t have a big group for the Trapdoor map, dropping 6 people down those ventilation shafts into a large spawn would have been a nightmare.

I have also been hitting the Tip missions up whenever I get them, working towards Hero alignment. They seem to have some nice writing which I enjoy and lots of Carnies who are good fodder for a Spines Dark Scrapper. I presume the Tips just keep dropping, but I am still working out what the other effects of doing these are.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Thanks for the warm responses.

Took my 50 Spines Dark Dark Scrapper out for a roll last night and had a great time mowing through some Radio and Tip missions.

Given that he actually spent power choices for the Fitness Pool and only has 2 Invention Set Enh and less than 10 standard IOs he looks like he needs a Respec and a lot of Upgrading of his Enh.

Most of my characters are on Justice so give me a yell if you se me.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Heelllloooooo Scrappers.

According to my login screen I have been offline for 975 days, but I had a few friends telling me about the current state of City of Heroes so I thought I would come back and give it another run. And seeing as I am a Scrapper at heart I thought my first stop should be the Scrapper forums.

So anyone here remember the old Screwy-One?? I have had one in game tell from one old friend so far and it sounds like there is some real action in the Australia channel so maybe I will get to team with a few people this time.

Where is the good stuff? What new content should I be having a look at? Who has the best guides?

What is OP these days? Any power set combos that are worth a look at?

What is up with the Market these days, people still trying to manipulate it or is that old hat now?

That s probably enough to start with, glad to be back and all that.

Warmest regards, Screwloose

And as always “I am not young enough to know everything.”

Statics I6 Empathy Electric Guide seems to be pretty straight forward and reasonable and has some good comments in the thread.

It is linked to in the Defender Guides and faqs thread in the Defender forum. Any I6 or later guides which include either Empathy or Electric should give you some ideas as to what you need to do with the powers.

regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

It might let you get through missions, but your slotting is not giving you the best result for some of those powers.

For a start your slotting works once you have all the powers you have listed, but until you get Focus Accuracy a lot of your attacks will have no more than the Base Hit Chance, which even against level+0 Critters is a disappointing 75%.

Your Dark Armour Resistance Toggles cost very little End, the third End reducer in them is saving you about 0.03 End per second, a whopping 1.8 End a minute. And not slotting Dark Embrace and Murky Cloud with 3 Resistance Enhancements means you are taking a lot more Damage.

Dark Regeneration needs to hit which before Focus Accuracy it won’t do reliably without Accuracy slotted in it.

Cloak of Fear has the worst Base Accuracy in the game, three End reducers just means it is cheaper to run to do nothing half the time. If you want it to do something besides look good it needs a couple of Accuracy SOs.

Oppressive Gloom costs next to no End, 0.08 End per second to be precise. Your 3 End reducers in it are saving you 0.04 End per second approximately, not enough for you to notice.

Putting more than 3 SOs worth of the same Enhancement in any power now produces greatly reduced returns, you aren’t getting good value for half the slots in Hasten or Stamina.

While I applaud your efforts to talk up the effectiveness of Claws Dark Armor and I agree with you on that, I would suggest that you and other potential Claws DA Scrappers have a look at other I6 and later Claws and DA guides and at Distant Deaths Scrapper Slotting basics guide rather than follow the suggestions you have made.

regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

Buffy.

I have a hard time recommending Cloak of Fear in it’s current form. I can kind of understand why it is as anaemic as it is, but if you are looking for bang for your power choice and end expenditure bucks then I can’t really recommend it.

Even if you are using Death Shroud and Quills Cloak of Fear will still slow the attack rate of Minions. And the To Hit debuff while not auto hit will be giving a measure of threat mitigation to all your teammates.

Unfortunately for any Scrapper Minions aren’t usually a problem and for a Spines DA Scrapper they aren’t worth targeting, you can usually rely on them KOing quickly just from the AE. And once you have Oppressive Gloom you are totally nullifying Minions anyway with the Stun so it doesn’t matter what CoF is doing to them.

Cloak of Fear should be a good Dark Armor power, it is one of the most Dark Armorish powers I can think of and it looks fabulous, it just doesn’t work.


Farmer Frost

The Black Wand or Nemesis Staff can stand in for a ranged attack, but the power I find most game changing in Darkness Mastery is the Single Target Hold.


Minotaur

I am leaning towards Weaponry for my MA SR Scrapper and it certainly should work fine for Spines DA too.

Regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

Go to the Tanker Guides and faqs thread at the top of the Tanker forums.

Docsharpe and Aettthorns Ice/Ice Tanker guides both look good and will have up to date info and include suggested builds.

Regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

With regards to Procs in Damage Auras, and other long duration DoT attacks, they only check for Proc every 10 seconds not every tick. It had been every tick when they were first released in the Testing Beta, until people started slotting them in "Rain" powers which tick twice a second.

I would have thought that attacks like Shadow Maul and Flame Thrower that are all DoT would only check once, if they didn't someone would have mentioned it by now (% . Perhaps they check once every 10 seconds, but since none I can think of run for 10 seconds you aren't going to get a second Proc check.

regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

You are incorrect. Critical Chance is determined per Attack and if it is on an attack with Damage split into several pulses, like Gamblers Cut or Shadow Maul, then it is still only one chance and does extra damage equal to the total of the Pulses.

For a while Shadow Maul checked Crits on each pulse and only gave additional damage equal to a single pulse, but after community and dev discussion it was changed to be the same as all the other powers.

Regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."

Sprint gives a higher Run Buff than either of the two Passives so for best returns slot it first.

After that if you have slots spare and want to go a little faster then you could put some in Swift or Quickness, but the returns will be small.

Regards, Screwloose.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

As Deadboy said if you are interested in how the powers play and how to use them to gain success then this is still a very useful guide to any AR Dev Blaster.

What it will require is that you can keep the changes of ED in mind for the slotting (simple rule, no more than 3 of the same SO in a power).

The I9 changes are pretty much the same for everyone so any commentary on them will be useful for you to read. I would start with Paragonwiki’s very comprehensive pages on the Invention System.

There are some things that will be useful to any character (like increased End Recovery) and to any character without Status Protection (like Knock Back Protection), but otherwise the IO Sets you might want to pursue are the ones that have the bonuses that look good to you and the ones that you can get the recipes and salvage together for. The last point can be a killer as some of the rare salvage needed for the more powerful Sets is going for very high prices at the moment, up to 5 Million Inf a piece.

Regards, Screwloose.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

The inner workings of game systems like ED are understood by very few, I think we have covered everything I know about it in just this thread, so it is worth while educating people. But I think most players find out as much as they need to know to play to the level they want to play at with a relative degree of success.

It seems to me that the Devs have been trying to make a game that you can play without having to subject every sub-system to rigorous analysis and run every part of your character through endless custom spreadsheets to make sure they are going to give a reasonable performance.

Of course if you want to have maximum performance then you need to delve a bit deeper into the nuts and bolts, which is part of what people are doing here.

I think we have just gotten past the scratching the surface part of the Inventions system and more posts like yours will take us a bit further into a better understanding of how to handle it to get what you want out of it.

Regards, Screwloose.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

[ QUOTE ]

1. IOs have diminishing returns like SOs, but a little differently. For instance, 1 LVL 45 IO gives a boost of 40.5% as the enhancement states. However, (2) LVL45 IOs yield a 79.6% boost (instead of 81%), or a loss of about .9%. Where did this go? The math for it is approximately 2 SOs would boost about 37% each (74% total - yes I know it's 38.3% for +3s and 33% for even lvl - the math works out to just about 37%), so the first 74% boost from your IOs has no loss in effect. The remaining 7% (of the 81%) yield only 85% of their power (or 7% x 85% = 5.95%), giving a total of 79.95% boost. So 2 lvl 45 IOs count as about 2.2 SOs, and that last .2 gets the usual decrease in power. The important result of this is that slotting about 2 2/3 IOs (at lvl 45, changes some based on lvl) is about the most you'd usually want to do. Beyond this you only gain 15% of the boost from the IOs. Another way to say this is at around 105% bonus for regular boost effects (Dam, ACC etc.), and at about 62% for the lower ones (Dam Res, Def, etc) you've "hit the wall" of diminishing returns where you're getting only 15% of the stated boost.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is just the start of Enhancement Diversification kicking in.

ED starts cutting back the bonus from Enhancements at a bonus of 75% and then really cuts it back hard at a bonus of 100%.

IOs work with ED exactly the same way all other Enhancements do.

Regards, Screwloose.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Anyone have a guide for MA/Invuln?

[/ QUOTE ]

I too am looking for a updated MA/Invul Guide. The I6 one I think is a little out dated.

[/ QUOTE ]

Except for Inventions I6 guides are up to date with the current version of the powers.

I would take anything in a guide with a grain of salt, but an I6 guide will have applicable basic info on its powersets.

A scan through the first 5 or 6 pages of the forum would also be good to see what people are saying about the powersts currently.

Regards, Screwloose.
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Its probably a simpler thing like not wanting to tamper with the more complex parts of the code. The guy who originally wrote it might not even be there now: software development is like that.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have often thought this might be the heart of more than one problem with the game for some time now. Superlative talent quickly abandons mediocre endeavors.

[/ QUOTE ]

Conversely I have seen the opposite happen more than once. A development team will tell you over and over that a particular thing just can not be done then a new guy shows up and all of a sudden he knows how to do it and it is simple and easy.

regards, Screwloose.
"I am not young enough to know everything."