Silencer7

man, how aggressively are these boards moderated

For all the tweaking you could do, it would be pretty tough to design a system that didn't allow me to design enemies with weaknesses tailored to my characters' particular strengths. We already see this with non-MA mobs.

Abilities like mez resistance might make the mob give a larger reward, but they don't help any if it's a brute killing them. Strong melee attacks don't help against flyers, etc.

is there something out that that explains all of this? I've always been sort of struck by the lack of information about atlas that was out there.

eh, what?

he was a human? humans have a fairly uniform size

You know honestly I'm with the argument against farming, and that this point I wish they'd just remove the AE completely rather than let the game continue as it is, but...

when you're getting out of shape over messages in broadcast, you're the one who has the problem. Broadcast has always been full of dumb junk; if you don't like it, turn broadcast off, or start liberally using your ignore button.

It's not even that most people who play energy are idiots, it's that there's no way to use a lot of powers in the set without interfering with what other people are trying to do.

I'm sure a lot of people rolled /energy thinking yeah, cool, shooting energy! And, the early game doesn't punish knockback the way the later levels do, because people aren't throwing aoe all over, so you wouldn't necessarily expect them to figure out the issue until they've put some time into the character. It isn't a problem with people being dumb, it's a problem with the set.

Yeah, basically what zem said.

Energy might not be hideously annoying in the hands of someone with "half a brain," but that doesn't make it good. You don't always have a wall or some handy corner to knock things into.

that effectively forces any energy blaster who wants knockback to give up one slot per power, and leaves energy otherwise without a secondary effect.

man, same thread is going on in the corruptor forum.

I don't mind storm because most people seem to be smart enough not to make it a huge issue, and you can talk to them about it if it is. What are you going to tell a PB or an nrg/ blaster/ruptor? Don't attack? It's lame.

You don't have to be a min maxer to recognize that energy blast loses substantial utility in most team situations in comparison to other blast sets.

It doesn't perform as well as every other set, and saying it does doesn't make it so.

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The more random the proc is, the harder the set will be to use in a reasonable way.

If you add a chance for knockup/down, energy blasters still have to plan around the chance for knockback, because knockback will still happen sometimes.

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Did you not read my post?

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you just plan on a KB happening and then when its U or D you can be "pleasantly surprised"

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So yes you would have to still plan on KB but the point is that it would not be as vital to do all the time and it would also make the set more team friendly and easier for new players to pick up and not tick every body off.

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The point is that it wouldn't fix the problem. I mean, what's the argument you're making? Let's make the set only irritate your team only say, 33% of the time, rather than 75% of the time?

The more random the proc is, the harder the set will be to use in a reasonable way.

If you add a chance for knockup/down, energy blasters still have to plan around the chance for knockback, because knockback will still happen sometimes.

Plenty of people hate energy blast.

If you're on a team of more than four people, odds are you're grouping a spawn up, since that makes killings things easier for all kinds of reasons. Barring a handy wall to knock things into, energy blast is pretty certain to disrupt what everyone else is trying to do.

slot your toggles. I mean, is this a joke?

There's no way to do anything other than reactively heal in CoX, because all the heals cast instantly (or within a half second or w/e.) The amount of time to react to incoming damage doesn't really make it necessary anyway.

This in contrast to other games where you can pre-cast a heal with a long activation time so that it will hit shortly after damage is taken.

"Doing your job" or "sacrificing for the team" is laudable, but they don't change the fact that grant cover is a terrible power. I mean, you're buffing the defenses of other people in melee, and maybe not even all of them, when those people have all probably invested substantially in their own defenses already.

Shield, needing weave to softcap and (probably) not having a self-heal, is very tight on power selections and slots. Wanting to help the team is awesome, but selecting, running, and slotting yet another toggle is probably doing more to hurt overall team utility than it is contributing to it. I would much rather have a scrapper kill things faster than sacrifice damage to buff the team.

stone/dark is going to kill you for end use until you get waaaay into the IO game.

The two aoe sets people seem to like are SS and elec. They're both good, but elec/ has one of those irritating melee cones and lightning rod is on a longish cooldown, so I prefer SS.

You could pretty easily pair SS with any of the secondaries you listed; elec armor and fiery aura are both good, but I would take fire because it's a hassle not having a self-heal.

It's just not a fundamentally useful power.

The defense that it adds to the team only becomes noticeable when there are 2-3 other debuffs available, and it's probably overshadowed by all of them, especially since you probably aren't slotting it. It's also one more toggle in a build full of toggles, and that all adds up.

The def debuff resist feels tacked on to make the power worthwhile, which apparently is the intent. My brute's taking it at 49, but I'll probably only ever run it against piles of enemies that apply def debuffs.

edit: also, it doesn't make any more sense for tanks than it does for scrappers or brutes. Every tank build already gets a 'grant cover' ability in their secondary; they call it taunt.

If you're softcapped anyway, I don't believe the tohit debuff is doing anything more for you. I didn't know that AV/EBs resist the damage debuff, though.

I'm actually trying to make the same decision on my shield brute, and I think what persuaded me is that darkest night is a better set mule (dark watcher's despair), and that OwtS doesn't provide enough survivability to be a good panic button.

I don't think CFR is that useful if you don't have something in your main sets to stack it with. If your choices are that and surveillance, I would take surveillance.

I would think you'll really be hurting for attacks in that build; even with hasten nearly perma, stomp and KO blow won't be up that often.

wouldn't the combat attributes window tell you?

what's the point of slotting active defense like that?

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If you are going to "fix" sb to make it easier to apply, could you do the same thing for density increase, clear mind, any kind of force fields, etc. (list every power in the game that needs to be applied to one teammate a time - sb is only one of them!).

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FF is 4 min while SB is only 2 mins and one of his suggestions was to make it 4 min just like FF

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3) Increase speed boost's duration. Speed boost's duration is short because it's a powerful buff, but I don't see any real reason it couldn't be longer. It's trivially easy to keep SB "perma" on a team anyway; the only issue is how much time the /kin has to spend doing it, and I don't see why we couldn't shorten that time.

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I don't like the AoE ones but I do like this one just make it 4 min would be fine with me

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That would be great. Problem is there has to be a trade off. Make it last twice as long = it will be half as effective.
The devs have explained this before. Powers are balanced based on end cost, duration, recharge, level of buff/debuff. In order to increase one, you have to decrease one of the others proportionally.

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They doubled the duration once before without halving it's effectiveness, so I don't see what that would be a requirement.

I mean, we're talking about a spammable buff, not one with an appreciable cooldown, so all it would do is slightly reduce the amount of time spent buffing. I don't see how that would upset balance.