Shred_Monkey

MA actually gives us tougher content. It's mostly ignored, but it *IS* there if you look for it. Additionally, the new difficulty levels give us the ability to make existing content impossible for most players.

In my opinion it isn't a lack of difficulty anymore that's an issue. It's a lack of reward for completing that difficulty. Who runs TFs on anything but even level or even -1 level? It's not unheard of to run at higher levels, but it's extremely rare. There's just no payback for it. In this game the best payback goes to speed, not power. I'd love for merits to go up for higher degrees of difficulty, and even smaller teams.

As to the OP... I'd like to see another 5-10 accolades added to the game. Accolades use the badge system which gives rewards to people for playing all of the game, instead of just grinding on whatever aspect of the game they can exploit most efficiently, ignoring everything else.

Blasters do more AoE damage then scrappers by far. It's not just a damage thing, it's an area thing. The blaster AoEs have much larger ranges and radiai, so they hit more spawn. (shield charge and lighting rod are a very glaring exception to this, but I'd say those 2 powers are unbalanced, not blasters).

Additionally, on most teams, there are enough forms of mitigation that scrapper survivabilty is completely worthless. You can just as easily say "blasters do more damage then scrappers, and they don't die... what's the point of scrappers nowadays?"

As far as blasters not being needed vs having more buffs/debuffs. You're missing something. A team of buffers and debuffers might be do a huge amount of force multiplying to make themselves equal or better then a team full of damage dealers. But if you add 1 or 2 damage dealers to that team of buffers/debuffers you'll have WAY more force to be "multiplied." A mixed team of buffers and damage dealers is better then all of 1 or all of the other.

Reading breifly through this thread I still stand by this statment. I've yet to meet a full built electric/shield scrapper who wasn't drooling over how powerful shield charge + Lighting rod actually is compared with anything else they'd ever played.

Try this question:

Has anyone out there built an elec/shield scrapper up completely and then said.. ."nah... my __/___ does better?"

I can't say I ever used WoC before slotting that proc as I mainly leveled up on teams with that toon where I don't bother with WoC. So if it's the proc that makes it good, then it still fits my experience. Interesting to know.

Mine is fire/mental/cold. I theorized I could solo a GM, but went with a slightly different build. Attempts to solo a GM with my current build were inconclusive. Which is to say I failed, but I was winning long enough to make me think it's possible... this thread confirms that to me.

At level 20... fighting on large teams... yeah... scrappers are fringe fighters. A katana (or broadsword) scrapper might be able to stand longer then most with Divine avalanche (or parry) assuming you're using it to it's full potential... but yeah... scrappers don't pile dive at level 20.. in fact, tanks don't really pile dive at that level yet either.

I'd say the best advice I can give for that level on teams is to pay attention to your teamates... don't kill the defender's anchor, attack fringe guys that are chasing down the squishies (because the squishies may be keeping you alive), let the tank lead.. you may even need to split spawns using pulling techniques and various control powers (not you, the controllers).

It's actually a fun way to play the game... a lot of MMORPGs become more difficult, requiring more teamwork and strategy like this at high levels, CoH is the opposite... as players level, they can become more reckless and ingore strategy. Unfortunately the majority of players in CoH will quit a team at any level that can't just blindly wade into any spawn it faces. Some even quit a team because it's not moving through the spawns fast enough. But that's CoH... it's the niche they've cornered in the MORPG market. I don't see it changing. Best solution I can offer is to find reagular teams who are willing to play a careful controlled game (and AE missions do offer that level of challenge for any team at high levels if you want). OR do like a lot of people do and sidekick up to a higher level team and just ride their coat tails until you're one of the high level toons.


Anyway, i'm getting off topic. As you level up... look for ways to increase your defenses. Weave, combat jumping, and maneuvers are options... I like adding IOs with typed defenses to willpower because it synergizes well with the +defense power in your secondary. And one thing you can be happy about, being a scrapper.. you can solo fast at any level if you can't find a team to your liking.

Actually... yes and no. If you monitor damage buffs on your blaster it caps at 400% but doesn't include your enhancements. So with 0% enhancement, even with 500% buffs, you only get +400% total. So to say it's 500% either false or incomplete, depending how you look at it.

how much is the endurance cost?

The discovery of Arcanatime was really a significant occasion to min-maxers. Prior to that point the way we calculated was to use published cast times. And from that we accounted the difference between actual damage output and reality by saying oh.. well, there some unexplained ineffecency that costs us about 10-15% DPS.

But what we didn't know is that our builds were actually less then optimal because of what that inefficiency was. For one, we had way more recharge then needed to run a chain tight. With longer cast times, the total recharge needed is often much lower and therefore we can add more 'other things' in our builds. Those 'other things' these days are what gets the sets other then /SR up to soft-cap defense numbers. Previously we hadn't started doing that to our AV killer builds because we thought we needed the recharge.

Furthermore, we now look at some attack chains that we would have thrown away before because their DPS was 'too low.' These attack chains are infact the best chains in most sets. Not using arcanatime, empower>sweeping strikes has, as I recall, 250+ DPS. With the same recharge the BF>AS>SS>AS chain only does around 230 DPS. Getting more recharge is next to impossible, so nobody would do BF>AS>SS>AS. However, the empower chain actually only does about 212 DPS whereas the BF>AS>SS>AS can actually run tight and is still at 230 DPS.

When I went back through all the attack chains after learning about Arcanatime, I believe I ended up finding new better attack chains in MA, DB, Claws, DM, Katana, and Broadsword. That was quite a significant change. Granted it also meant we couldn't do as much damage as we thought we could... but we did learn how to do more damage then we were actually doing.

Here's my little part of the story Arcana was telling earlier. I built shred monkey to use the empower>sweeping strikes chain and tried it out. I discovered to my frustration I wasn't doing the DPS I thought I should. By accident I started trying BF>AS>SS>AS because it just seemed like my attacks were up enough to do that (although by my math they shouldn't have been up fast enough to run without gaps). Unable to explain why I was seeing what I saw, I started plugging numbers in my spreadsheet. The only explination I could come up with was that there seemed like there was a lag of about 0.2 seconds after each power. I emailed BaBs to see if there was an animation at the end of each power 'returning to home' that took 0.2 seconds. He didn't respond. But when I sent the same PM to arcanaville, she PM'd some detail about what she'd been studying (as she mentioned above, that became arcanatime).

And for the record, one might expect an average of 1.5 ticks to be added to each attack from arcanatime. (half-way between 1 and 2 ticks). 1.5 ticks is (1.5*0.132= .198). So my 0.2 guess was really pretty decent for doing all my calculating by just tweaking numbers in a spreadsheet and visually watching my powers recharge.

Ahah! Aracaville was wrong about Werner being the one to call it Arcanatime. She can make a mistake!

(although she'll probably write a response to this post demonstrating how she make the correct assumption based on all of the information at her disposal, which included things most of would have never considered before).