Shred_Monkey

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Test_Rat View Post
    So you are telling me that you have never seen someone recruiting for a LRSF/STF, say asking for "Damage" and turning away stalkers?

    Never? What server do you play on, I gotta take note for the next free transfer week.
    They're not saying they've never seen that. They're saying the people doing that are idiots.
  2. I'm going to dumb down the conversation a bit with my more pragmatic input.

    The way I see it, there's a lot of conceivable possibilties to investigate, but they all come up with one of 3 results. That being the activation of a recharged power can start at the first tick after the sum of the activation time plus the recharge time. Or "that" + 1 tick. Or "that" + 2 ticks. Whatever the reason, it appears to me from trying various recharge levels, the answer is +1 tick.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
    The fact that it relies on hits landing doesn't mean that it misses more often than other stuff. It means that it's potentially impacted more by missing, which is different.

    Of course I tend not to use my combos much, generally only using Vitals Strike when I can hit a lot of foes with it, so that doesn't actually affect my DB/Regen much.
    The fact that it has a very easily perminately double stacked tohit buff actually makes DB considerably more accurate then other sets... and thus more able to overcome -tohit debuffs then other sets.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gulanzon View Post
    Yes, but we're the only greedy species with a global network. Ants are small. Lemmings don't trade.

    Locust swarms might well be an anthropogenic problem due to our farming practices.

    etc, etc.

    You addressed that we are not the only wildly destructive creatures on the planet, but you avoided the issue of our capability to organise ourselves on a massive scale, and create multiple interacting communities on vast and varying scales.



    Too much? Ouch, that's harsh.

    I don't think t boils down to what sort of a mentality I have. If you'll read back to my opening post: I see nature running wild outside Praetoria, and it fills me with peace. I think it's beautiful.

    Civilisation disappoints me.

    Of course there is a middle ground: the human race needn't be eradicated. Perhaps we should all just get sent back to the stone age, when we were too fragmented to pose such a large-scale threat to the planet. Unfortunately we as a species would almost certainly recover



    Unless you're half-in game mode too, I'm not exactly advocating ecoterrorism in the real world. Just to clarify.
    This guy loses a lot of his credibilty by the fact he's using his personal computer to post on an internet website dedicated to an online game.

    If he's being 'in charictor'... interesting viewpoint. If he's really trying to convince us this is his view of the world... sorry... go live under a tree somewhere or I don't buy it.
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by DarknessEternal View Post
    Why doesn't the game and MIDS just update the cast times to these values?
    The numbers shown by the game and mid's are correct for those powers. The issue is that due to the mechanics of the interface between the user and the server there is some additional delay time that explains the descrepency between what is reported by in game numbers and actual observation. Arcanaville wrote up a long discussion of this (thus the term 'arcanatime'. I believe she has a link in her sig.

    I think it'd make practical sense for arcanatime to be reported by mid's in addition to real numbers. But if you're going to only desplay 1 cast time, it should be the real number as, that's the value that's reported by all official sources whenever there's an update.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Maelwys View Post
    Concerning Primaries, it depends entirely on mob damage resistances. If I remember my spreadsheets correctly...

    ...Claws (even with perma-stacked follow up buffs) and Dual Blades (comparatively poor Single Target DPA as I remember, sorry...) don't come close... even if you discount the fact that lethal damage is fairly highly resisted.
    You're spreadsheets need some work. If you refer to the Pylon results thread and remove all the /shields builds, you'll find claws and DB leading the field for a reason.
  7. Just to clerify you're first statement, the top chain is BF>SS>AS... (not BF>AS>SS)....SS needs to follow BF so the triple stack of BF is on the biggest attack.
  8. I think the crux of the OP's inquiry is this:

    If a broadsword toon and a Katana toon, both IO'd to the gills, go into 2 different +3 battle maiden spawns and kill the bosses as fast as possible, who wins? (Katana, btw)

    The top scrapper at that challenge is probably a DM/Shield. If you take away the minions and LTs for their damage boosting properties, it's probably claws/fire or DB/fire.
  9. GSFC gives positional defenses, not defense to all. You're 6 slotting a power for very little gain. You're better off slotting 2 rectified recticles there for 1.88 smash/lethal and free up 4 slots.

    I see a lot of people do that, btw.
  10. When I think of the base HP for scrappers... I think 1337 +1.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Trashman View Post
    Hey I'm a long time player, although I just returned to the game. I always wanted to play a scrapper, but I wasn't sure what I wanted. But now I sort of do, and I thought I would enlist the help of the scrapper pros.

    Basically I want a boss killer. My vision of this guy is to join 8 man teams (for the purposes of this a generic team will do just fine) and only focus on the bosses until I kill them all. I don't want to argue whether this is effective, I just want to try this for myself.

    I am pretty much set on regen, although if any of you have strong urges elsewhere, go ahead. So my problem is the primary. Right now I'm looking at BS and MA, although I am a scrapper noob.

    Anyway, any advice would be fantastic thanks!
    As you can see from the other responses, you're probably safe with just about any scrapper primary except for spines. As far as boss killing on an 8 man team, I play this way a lot (except for when I play my spines/electric). It's a good strategy for speeding up a team's pace as there are often several AoE "farmer" types on a random team that will do a good job of taking out the minions/LTs... and the Bosses tend to be the last living target of each spawn unless someone is focusing on them. Scrappers are indeed an excellent choice for this task as they can go headfirst into the full spawn first if desired and start beating on the boss right away. Plus they have the ST damage output to finish the bosses in the time the rest of the the team takes to mop up the rest.

    I personally prefer the fast animating attacks sets such as claws, dual blades, and Dark Melee over the slower big hitters like broadsword and to some extent MA. Broadsword may do big burst damage, but I find that's often wasted when on a team. It's not unusual to target something click headsplitter and watch it's hitpoints disappear before your animation finishes.

    I'm not sure I'd take regen, because you really do want to be the first toon into the spawn to be very efficient at what you're doing. Regen can do that well with MoG and Shadowmeld from the stalker patron pools, but what you're essentually doing with those 2 powers is turning yourself into a well built /shield or /SR scrapper for 15 seconds... why not just be a well built /shield or /SR scrapper?

    That said, there's dozens of ways to do what you're wanting to do. All are effective. The points and counter points are essentually about whether you'll be able take down those bosses in 10 seconds vs 11 seconds... You'll probably spend more time waiting for teammates to show up to the mission then the difference between playing boss killer with the best scrapper option versus the worst scrapper option.
  12. I concur. I don't like how bright the Praetoria load screens and charicter select screens are. I generally play in a dim room with quiet music in the background (is that as wierd as it sounded?) The bright screens make me wince every time.
  13. Shred_Monkey

    Counterattacks

    I've never considered this before, but it's true. This game doesn't have any way to reflect attacks or spells back on the originator. I find that odd since that's a very common D&D concept.
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tayla Ewa View Post
    Or the psionic lance.. all your toon has to do is look at the enemy.. how does one -miss-?
    Well duh? You can't attack my brain without looking me in the eyes... which is why all my toons have masks!

    Sounds silly, but it's basically the concept we have for sheilds and parry adding defense. The attacks do hit... they just hit the shield/sword and do no damage.
  15. DE quartz eminators give an accuracy buff. It's prettty significant. This may be what people are seeing. Kill them first, or just retreat to draw the spawn away from them.

    I think it's just a case of people not being accustomed to fighting the more difficult high level groups so they don't know what they're up against.
  16. Money comes into the economy only from defeating enemies. Defeating enemies at level 50 gives way more then low levels. The differense is that more people are playing at level 50 because IO's gave people a reason to do so.
  17. Shred_Monkey

    neverselling ice

    I saw that happening, which means of course I was looking to buy some ice (or I wouldn't have noticed). As I recall I just bid 11,111 each for what I needed and took a bathroom break. When I got back I had my bids filled. Common salvage spikes are never anything to panic over.
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex View Post
    Keep in mind that Piercing Rounds does have -Resistance (I think only when fired with Lethal bullets).
    Is this true? Is it only with lethal bullets?
  19. Shred_Monkey

    New Merits....

    I've used A-merits to buy lower level IO that just weren't available to buy at any price.

    Typically I'd limit myself to use A-merits for things that cost over 50M inf per merit to buy at auction. I use that number amount because it's easy to remember and that's approxtimately what I could get by buying LoTGs or Numina procs and selling them.
  20. Didn't stone come out on top of our theoretical discussions? Although it's chain is an endurance hog.
  21. Thanks to all who replied. Interesting thread. I've really not spent much time on the buffer side of the game, so this is all new to me. Personally, I've never played a toon who felt speed boost was needed. But I do like having it. I just never knew it took so much upkeep by the buffer.

    To the people who said "why would you play a kin without speed boost". It's simple. People play blasters, right? Well, I'd rather have fulcrum shift then have all 9 powers of any blaster secondary. Most teams would agree with that, too.

    (note, this toon, if he gets played up will be a corruptor, so damage is 'supposed' to be one of the focuses of the toon).
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by MunkiLord View Post
    Actually, I'm gonna have to go against fire/shield and elec/shield. You just do so much AoE damage that you often make your teammates feel useless. If you kill everything stupidly fast, what are your teammates gonna do?

    Also, in case you couldn't tell, this is sarcasm.
    heh... it's actually true though. Especially if you play on 2-3 man teams. The healer won't do any thing because you don't need heals.. tankers won't do anything because you don't need tanks... debuffers won't have time to set up for each spawn. Buffers are boring to begin with, imho.

    2-3 scrappers would be a good option and equally fun for both.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by StormyDarkness View Post
    Three choices:

    1) Be a FF or Sonic Defender with their big bubble.

    2) Acrobatics

    3) Buffs via various non-self ways. Break free, CM, Clarity, FF/Sonic big bubble, etc.
    It won't help the OP, but to be complete: traps' FFG also has hold protection.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Transhade View Post
    About 70% of the Kins that I have played with lately do not even speed boost.

    I would be more worried if a Kin didn't fulcrum shift.
    You know. I might just try that. I'll speed boost as needed (someone low on endurance) or just not at all and see if anyone complains.

    .
  25. I'm looking at and liking a build I have for a kinetics/archery defender (or corruptor). I played the defender version up to level 12 and learned very quickly that I really do not enjoy maintaining speed boost on my teamates. Frankly, I mainly play scrappers and damage dealers, and the idea of rebuffing 7 players every 2 minutes all night long is not fun for me. I'm aware that this may just mean kinetics isn't the set for me, but I'm wondering if any of you expirienced kineticists find that not having speed boost, or not keeping it up 100% of the time is heavily frowned upon.

    Also, as an alternative, if there's a bind/macro I can use to quickly cycle through my teamates by tapping a button 7 times in a row, that'd probably help me enjoy the toon a lot more.

    Any suggestion or advice?