Siolfir

The power itself doesn't stack five times. It simply enables the Siphon buff from your other attacks (minus Repulsing Torrent), and provides a tohit bonus for 20 seconds.

The buffs that are enabled while it is active (ie, the +dam you get from hitting with an attack) are what will stack up to 5 times; they last for 10 seconds each and don't go away when Power Siphon itself wears off.

Headsplitter does a base of 162.66 damage at level 50; *5 for damage cap, *2 for critical = 1626.6 damage.

Greater Fire Sword does base 142.64 damage, and the DoT doesn't critical. It would deal 1426.4 damage on a critical, plus 312.75 DoT, for a total of 1739.15 at the damage cap if all DoT ticks happen.

Both are less than the Assassin's Strike normal critical of 1946.4 (at the damage cap).

The specific system mentioned (Incarnates), is not in currently. There's also not a hard release date other than "Fall 2010".

As for the other endgame content, there are plenty of Task Forces and Strike Forces, Trials, and oh, yeah... there's that whole Cathedral of Pain Trial that takes a few teams working in coordination that came out with Going Rogue (and with coordination happens quickly, and without it falls apart). But I suppose you already knew about all of that, since you "did your research".


No. It's not a random zone event, and you DO get xp for killing things before "completing" it. Why don't you learn something about the game before you try to come up with an "objective" review?

And all quests are missions - or did you not even read what you linked? Specifically, this part here:
And the fact that you managed to find a more than four-year-old GDC article where the term "quest" is used doesn't change that it's primarily relegated to the fantasy genre, despite the terms being fairly interchangeable as far as meaning.

Well, I made it this far into the thread, and just decided - since this is the second time you bring this up that immediately came to mind - that you simply have no business playing any MMO.

You don't like repetitive content. All MMOs are repetitive. "But such-and-such game has you click these powers instead of those powers, so it's a change!" No, it's not - and it's the same the next couple dozen times you run it there, too.

You want "tangible rewards" - uhm, you're playing a computer game. Unless it's an illegal online gambling site, there are no tangible rewards in any of them. The only reward in any of them is the enjoyment you get in playing; if you aren't having fun, then you shouldn't be doing it. It seems like you didn't have fun in this game, and that's fine. But saying that it's because you didn't get a tangible reward is just petty and, quite frankly, pathetic.

While we're on rewards, you mention that you end up "getting rewards just to make the next set of rewards easier to get". Where does it stop in, for example, WoW? Oh, wait - the end game there, that you claim that is missing here, is to grind to get everything in whatever the most recent dungeon is, so that you can grind to get everything in the next expansion. For what purpose? So you can grind to get everything in the expansion after that. Are you seeing a pattern developing here? It's a staple of the genre.

As for throwing out the mission text as irrelevant: do you dismiss story as unimportant in every RPG you review? Because it would seem to indicate a severe lack of understanding in the entire genre. See, in them, you make a character that goes through a story - you know, story, that "flavor text" garbage that can make a game with otherwise completely bland mechanics memorable?

Frankly, while you're welcome to your own opinion, I don't think that putting up a strictly opinion piece is going to cut it as a "professional" review. Your defense of your lack of professionalism here just adds to that impression. If you want to review games as a career, maybe you should do some research beyond coming up with some Trivial Pursuit questions - start with "What about this game makes the people who play it, like it?" If you can't answer that question in your review, then you failed as a reviewer - because you didn't even try to get to the heart of the game.

Kinda vanilla.


*flees*

Silent Blade doesn't have to outlast much - she's also got Sha and can just heal it right back.

It was funny when I was playing my (softcapped) Elec/Nin through the Hero Alignment mission - the only damage either of us did for a couple of minutes was due to Caltrops, and the rare hit that Sha took care of immediately. Finally, her Retsu crashed; shortly thereafter, so did her hp bar.

Also, PP MoG doesn't bother me all that much since if it goes off, I know that I let them hit it - it also doesn't last the full duration. Sure it's annoying, but you can stop it. On the other hand, Rise of the Valkyrie sucks - especially with the "can't target while rezzing" code that prevents me from hitting her with debuffs (like Benumb) before it goes off like I used to.

On top of that, Martial Arts (now) does more sustained single target damage* and, were EM ported to Scrappers with the same reduced criticals that Stalker received, MA would also have better AoE than Energy Melee.





* - assuming a critical rate of 5%; without criticals EM does a smidge more but MA only exists on ATs that get criticals. math here

Fixed that for you.

So you're saying it's not the size of the blade, but how you use it?

I can see it now... Piercing Rounds' animation where instead of guns, you throw both knives spinning up in the air, catch them on the way down, and stab the person. Because something has to fill that time...

In any case, I like the idea of using Spines as a base for twin poisoned knives - and really, other than the PBAoEs (Spine Burst and Quills for Scrappers) the animations all could fit - but I don't know if the customization would be able to do it. IIRC all of the current Spines customizations have the same anchor points for the spines, they just look different at the same spot - I could be wrong on that, though.

Not quite - since Rain of Fire summons a pseudopet, which deals the damage through an auto power (which ticks every 0.2 seconds), the damage proc uses the rules for being in an auto power. Which is to say, it has a chance for going off every 10 seconds.

So potentially it can go off twice in RoF, due to the 15 second duration of the pet: once at initial activation, and once 10 seconds in.

You may want to rephrase how you put that - my Fire/Fire Blaster can "jump into a mob of +4/x8 carnies"... typically because the tank is too afraid to do so. Jumping into the mob isn't difficult at all! And since she has Rise of the Phoenix, I can even jump back out of the spawn, too.

Blatantly false. Scourge has a chance of going off based on the enemy hp at time of power activation. The "rain" powers (including Blizzard, Rain of Fire, Ignite, and Ice Storm) Scourge a lot because they are autopowers on a pseudopet that activate every 0.2 seconds, NOT because they are DoT.

Regular DoT attacks actually hurt your chance to Scourge, since it checks once (at activation), and on the next attack activation the enemy's hp haven't dropped as much as they would if the attack had dealt all of its damage at once.

So did I, but I don't play Tankers much (I have 3 total, and only one - the 50 SD/SS - made it out of the 20s). I never died from using Hand Clap either, but that may be due to having skipped it.

Strange.... I'm getting the following error (when you click on the "detail" button): Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

Could you be pulling up a cached page, or is it just my connection?

Right.

Also, if anyone cares, the adjusted-for-Arcanatime DPA on the attacks (damage scalar/sec):
Concentrated Strike: 1.173
Smashing Blow: 1.019
Body Blow: 0.879
Assassin's Strike: 0.861
Quick Strike: 0.795
Focused Burst: 0.731
Burst: 0.43

Brutes are still ahead of Stalkers, and can be ahead of many Scrappers barring external damage buffs, but it requires leveraging Fury for all that it's worth. The lowered damage cap means that once you start applying damage buffs, they fall behind Scrappers for good, though - previously they could catch up and pass a Scrapper on the 2nd Fulcrum Shift.

Also, in terms of single-target, Stalkers can be ahead of Scrappers (or Brutes) due to the scaling critical rate, if you make a lot of assumptions about attack chains (identical), team positioning (all w/in 30'), and damage buffs (none); it also neglects how much more effective AoEs would be in that situation, and the Scrapper/Brute would tend to have more AoE damage.

I just check daily to see if I need to update my sig.

But hey, when I just tried to go to it, I got a nice page not found error instead of the usual, so maybe it's being looked at?

Nah, that can't be it. It's probably just being removed.