Streethunter

Well, not everyone has the math committed to memory, and are just working under the impression that base brute damage output is high. That's the flaw in working from empirical evidence.

Anyway, thanks for the info.

I made my prototypical Fire/Therm sun-god pharoah guy, picking the powers largely to fit the theme. Never tried Thermal, but looking at it makes me wonder if it's a non-stop buff-spamming nightmare. I've had a Force Field Defender, and kind of enjoyed that okay, but Thermal has so many single-target buffs to keep floating around that it scarcely looks like one would have a chance to blast anything. Checked out the guides, but they are nine issues old and mostly describe the powers and the author's basic likes and dislikes, not a comprehensive strategy.

If you're on a team of eight with a Therm, what's your basic routine? Do you forego anything but buffing? Do you only selectively buff certain party members?

I played a Necro/Poison MM until around 20 and didn't enjoy it. Alkaloid is a truly lousy heal, and there's little else in the package to help keep your pets alive. Envenom and Weaken are very powerful, but single-target debuffs are of limited value in the majority of fights. Noxious breath is the only group debuff, and I just don't think it makes enough of a difference.

Basically, in many fights you'll find yourself spewing the breath, then waiting for it to recharge. Not much else to do. Alkaloid is such an Endurance sink that you might find yourself just giving up on it.

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FFG has a higher modifier.

Basically the FFG is a Defender's dispersion bubble whilst a Mastermind's Dispersion Bubble is slightly lower.

Mastermind Dispersion Bubble: 7.50%

FFG: 10%

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Interesting. FF only has three major features, and one of them is the big bubble. Discounting that, the big selling point becomes the defense bonuses of the two spam bubbles.

Good points. The basic strategy would be for me to pull the aggro back to the pets.

How does Traps' FFG stack up against FF's Dispersion Bubble?

Thinking about gacking my Necro/FF MM and rolling up a Necro/Traps MM. Anyone tried this? Good combo or bad?

To the OP: it's a bad idea to try to pass off a rant as a question. Instead, warn people that what they're about to read is a rant. You actually have a chance for some supportive responses that way. People don't like couched rants.

Also, employ breaks in paragraphs. If you find yourself too worked up to break your thoughts up into bite-sized chunks, you probably ought to calm down before you proceed.

Now, as to the subject at hand: I have a friend with a 50 fire/kin. He has some high-level Portal mission that he uses to farm clumps of demons standing around, to all appearances discussing the weather (I'm told they're alternate-universe CoT).

I gotta say, this guy does just rip right through'em all on his lonesome without any semblance of risk. They're conning orange and red to him, so it's pretty darned impressive to behold.

Not advocating a nerf or anything--but yowza!

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I want one of those old fashioned deep sea diver helmuts and a gorilla suit.


Yeah I've been watching really bad sci-fi movies.

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Hey, what's the name of that movie? I want to see if they ever released the MST3K episode of it.

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Robot Monster

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this must be your first villain.

there are more arcs with EB's and AV's redside post 40 than anything blue side. you WILL run into them. yo uwill run into them several times just trying to unlock a patron pool.

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Not my first villain, but I don't have any post-40 characters, period. I don't try to rush my toons to 40 like so many others who treat everything before that as the preliminaries. I think anything past is pretty fun to play, and tapers off around 40 by virtue of all the tier 9 madness.

Having said all of that, why do I need to be able to *solo* AV's? I'll just team up with friends.

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um..rush?

you've been playing off and on since 2005 - 4 years - and have no characters over 40? not even one?

you arent just not rushing, you've gone to the extreme opposite of the spectrum

hold your opinion of how masterminds play until you've played them doing grandville arcs 40+

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Pfah. Nonsense. There's more to the game than the endgame. Why should I "hold my opinion" about the rest of the game that I do enjoy?

And to heck with this spectrum you speak of. People play at a pace that they enjoy. Most of my game time was spent soloing in a pre-CoV environment. Not only no AE, but no newspapers or radios. After doing all the door missions that contacts offered, it was often necessary to streetsweep to ding. I remember 19th level toons crowding The Land of the Lost in Skyway and cursing each other for claim-jumping spawns, simply because there were no other real options (no Striga, for instance). Streetsweeping now is considered...quaint. Folks don't know how good they got it

My highest level toon rarely sees action. He's not as much fun to play. All the options available to him boil down to Aim + Rain of Arrows when teaming and laying Trip Mines when he's soloing. Everything else is just mop up. So, with most builds that's what I have to look forward to at high levels: tier 9 powers overturning the apple cart (apparently to the extent that the only big challenge is soloing an enemy that was designed to be fought with an entire team). That's why I'm attracted to the MM, as I hope it offers a sane degree of advancement.

But if it makes you happy, Jupiter, maybe I should just go PL a Fire/Kin controller just to say I have an OTT level 50 lying around gathering dust.

I didn't use the word "round" because the human cranium is already rather round. Imagine all the snappy replies that would have invited! The human head is not, however, shaped like a sphere or orb.

Anyway, I didn't spot a forum specifically for the topic of character design, so I thought I'd ask here. Guess nobody's tried to pull it off before me!

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this must be your first villain.

there are more arcs with EB's and AV's redside post 40 than anything blue side. you WILL run into them. yo uwill run into them several times just trying to unlock a patron pool.

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Not my first villain, but I don't have any post-40 characters, period. I don't try to rush my toons to 40 like so many others who treat everything before that as the preliminaries. I think anything past is pretty fun to play, and tapers off around 40 by virtue of all the tier 9 madness.

Having said all of that, why do I need to be able to *solo* AV's? I'll just team up with friends.

Basically, I'm looking to make a guy with white skin and a head shaped sort of like a full moon. Obviously, a true sphere isn't doable, But if I can contract the bottom and top while expanding the middle, I can hopefully pull it off.

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No its just for AR. Because they felt guilty that AR did not have Aim, it gives the extra damage to sniper rifle that you would have gotten from Aim.

My AR/Dev skipped both Sniper Rifle and TD. Couldn't fit them in and still have all the gadgets I liked.

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OK, no Aim for AR. It all makes sense now.

Yeah, I don't the point of snipes. In a practical sense, not worth all the high costs involved. In a thematic sense, sniping is not something I see traditional heroes doing, so I'm not sure why it's ubiquitous to blaster sets rather than specific to a few.

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So, how viable is necro/FF?

I was thinking about trying a necro/traps build. But honestly, Traps is a complete mystery to me. Tried it on a corrupter and lost interest around the time I got the FFG. In terms of cool toys it seemed pretty heavily backloaded. Then again, a corruptor and a MM are pretty different, so maybe traps will do the trick.

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do you want to solo av's?

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Honestly? (mini-rant warning ahead)

Why should I want to solo an AV? Please, somebody enlighten me. I really have no clue why there is non-stop talk about this subject. It just sounds like an irrelevant gimmick that's been blow up into the end-all, be-all of character greatness. Maybe there's something to it I'm just missing.

I've read some of these threads. To solo an AV, there's a very cut-and-dried formula. We know why FF doesn't work well and DM, Traps, and Poison do. It's very unlikely most of the people who do so are coming up with a build that hasn't already been done, so for them, zero points for creativity. And since the capabilities essential to shutting down an AV--namely, hefty anti-regen effects--don't carry over to the way you fight the other 99% of battles, it's not a true metric of overall power.

So, in a practical sense, what's the big whoop? Some neat badge or prize you get for doing 100% of the damage to an AV? Once I have the answer to that, I'll ponder whether or not I want to spend time taking down an AV.

Otherwise, the practical considerations mainly have to do with handling door mishes smoothly.

Read some mention of Super Science being the next booster pack. Was wondering what it might include. Sure would love to see some kind bubble, jar, or dome helmet, preferably with the option to have it filled with some colorable fluid. And maybe a brain to float inside it!

Been interested in doing a toon whose head is orb-shaped. Anyone tried doing this with the sliders?

So, I passed on Targeting Drone with my last respec for my Archery blaster. Just didn't feel like it was doing much for me. My Thunderstrikes have baked-in Accuracy, and I haven't seen much demand for +perception yet. In fact, I think it's just Web Grenade and Trip Mines ATM.

I was wondering about the snipe damage bonus...is it still really just designed to buff the AR snipe? I could see limiting it to one powerset for testing purposes, but keeping it that way seems odd.

Well, the stuff about the Prima guide has me apalled, and many other posts gave me a ROFL or two, but this thread has certainly cultivated a certain air of snobbery and mean-spiritedness. Let's have a reality check:

A lot of players don't read the forums. Most, I would dare say. They don't know all of the optimal builds, and they probably suffer from the delusion (and try not to laugh here) that a powerset offers a variety of builds, rather than break down into a bunch of "must-haves" and "always-skips". They might also make choices on something as fatuous as the concept they had in mind for their character (apparently, they haven't figured out that the "right way" is to convolute a concept around your powers, not vice-versa).

So yeah, disgusting as it may be, a guy might build a thugs toon and actually take all the pistol powers, because he thinks the pistols are cool and powerful. A guy might take powers out of the fighting pool to grant some melee capability to a toon that doesn't have it and probably doesn't need it because he conceived of his character as some kind of unarmed-combat expert. And some chick might pick dark heals because she thinks dark looks neat and she wants to be a healer. And let's get into the folks who don't want to pick a movement power because their character doesn't actually have powers.

And here's what takes away all of the sadness: people can still have fun with suboptimal toons. I guess that's part of their foolishness--they don't realize how much they shouldn't be having playing an AT that can't solo an AV or whatever else the yardstick for success is. Heck, on most eight-roller door teams, it's pretty hard to get dropped and if you drop it's very easy to get put back on your feet in short order.

So, how viable is necro/FF?

I was thinking about trying a necro/traps build. But honestly, Traps is a complete mystery to me. Tried it on a corrupter and lost interest around the time I got the FFG. In terms of cool toys it seemed pretty heavily backloaded. Then again, a corruptor and a MM are pretty different, so maybe traps will do the trick.

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Or you could use commands to move your henchmen into melee range like the other competent MM players. There is a reason we have advanced controls for pets and controllers don't. The MM was not designed to be an AT that just sits back and yells "Attack!" all day long (unless you're Bot/FF, even then you need goto occasionally).

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Obnoxious much?

Battlefields are hectic places. In the middle of a free-for-all reactively clicking and mousing with the GoTo swirly sometimes isn't ideal, nor competent. A proactive attack plan that minimizes reactive mousing-around strategies is what competence dictates. You can now go on to tell me how you do it all the time and it works like gangbusters, but the neat thing about people going out of their way to be rude is that you can assume a certain level of equivocation on their part, since you know there's a lack of good will anyway.

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You know, you're right. I apologize for coming off as rude as I did.

What I should have said was you deprive your grave knight one of his (better) melee attacks if you don't enchant it, which you can't really afford to do. Even without enchanting, he retains one fairly rapid ranged attack, so it's not a guarantee that he will run to melee. Unfortunately, you cannot let the AI take care of itself either. You won't see top performance from your henchmen unless you make use of all the commands available.

A piece of advice that might be helpful: Bind an easy key to hit as your goto command; better yet, bind shift+lbutton as a goto. Then all you have to do is shift click and the pets go to the spot you picked. You'll never see the swirly.

I've just recently started playing with necro, and I've found that I need a different strategy than normal. Usually, I have every tier of henchmen do the same thing, but I've had to adapt to the zombies' fragility. I changed the usual binds so that I never actually command the zombies to do anything. They remain in defensive follow regardless of any attack, goto, or stance commands. While I command the heavy hitters, I maintain my meatshield that vomits on anything that wanders close enough to me.

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Apology accepted. You make good points that I shouldn't take lightly. In a thread where few folks seem empathetic, it's easy to become oversensitive.

Keybinds are inclusive, not exclusive, right? If you keybind to leave the zombies out of your orders, don't you basically have to set up two sets of keybinds--one set for the grave knights, and one for the lich? As for the Shft + Lclick Goto, is that just a Grave Knight Goto?

Also, once you're attacked, doesn't defensive stance cause the zombies to start running around on their own doing stuff without your direction?

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How about not. This is a TA discussion, so take your Poison eslewhere.

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I hit you with Weaken. You are now 74.5% less Special.

Poison foevah!

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Poison is a single-target set. So, you make one guy less special, the rest of us come at you and rip apart your minions faster than you can spam Alkaloid.

TA may have issues, but Poison is poop.

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On a related tangent, when an IO gives a flat bonus like this (or, for instance, Decimation's 10% Chance for Buildup) that doesn't scale to level, why would a higher level version of the IO be worth more than a lower-level one?

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People like having clean numbers in their builds - 33s across the board for example.

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That's all? Numerical aesthetics???

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I don't particularly like the change (for one thing, I have to either summon the Bruiser after I give everyone else the first Upgrade, or move him out of its radius) but it's really neither a nerf nor a buff.

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Well, you're entitled to your opinion. Seems awful to me, but like I said, an FF MM has to bubble-bubble individually anyway, so bubble-bubble-enchant was just part of the rhythym.

What you mentioned about the bruiser, about not wanting to upgrade him--been thinking along the same lines with the grave knight. Not sure I want him standing back throwing dark at mobs instead of pummeling them on the front line.

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Or you could use commands to move your henchmen into melee range like the other competent MM players. There is a reason we have advanced controls for pets and controllers don't. The MM was not designed to be an AT that just sits back and yells "Attack!" all day long (unless you're Bot/FF, even then you need goto occasionally).

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Well, that was kinda rude.

Battlefields are hectic places, and Goto commands can produce undesirable results even in otherwise calm situations. In the middle of a free-for-all, reactively mousing around with the GoTo swirly sometimes isn't ideal, and produces results that can hardly be considered "competent". Competence dictates a proactive attack plan that minimizes reactive strategies (this is pretty much endemic to playing classes in just about any MMO). You can now go on to tell me how you do it all the time and it works like gangbusters, but the neat thing about people going out of their way to be rude is that you can assume a certain level of equivocation on their part, since you know there's a lack of good will anyway.

Thanks for the link and the summation!

Looking forward to the changes. I really like dominators as-is. I really hate the entry for the Dominator in Paragon Wiki that's been there for like, what, a year or two now? All that couched complaining and even first-person remarks--I'd love to see it revised.

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I guess you have a point here somewhere, but darned if I know what it is.

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The basic point is that the OP is making a statement that follows the following pattern:

"I feel that X should be better/equal/worse than Y"

The key word is "feel". It is impossible to put a number to a feeling. It's a subjective experience. It is possible to compare our experiences into what might be a better powerset, but what you might consider a metric is debatable too. We could compare the number of enemies that I could defeat per minute with powerset X. That might be an important metric to a farmer, but is it important to someone who is only playing the game to relax?

So, the "Apples to Oranges" argument comes up again. Sure, you can compare any metric you want between them, but those metrics are based on subjective opinions on what people feel are important. Which makes the OPs opinion important( which is that /TA feels like it underperforms), but comparing /TA to another powerset realy does not make for an compeling argument.

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Comparing TA to another powerset can make for a very compelling arguement. The element of subjectivity can be allowed for; the notion that the indistillable element of subjectivity iirreparably poisons any debate and discussion is bogus, or else there'd be very few topics to debate or discuss. Goodbye internet forums. Goodbye 60 Minutes. Goodbye newspaper editorials.

The OP did not simply state what he "feels" without any attempt to support his position through an analytical process. He suggested that TA's role is to debuff, so it should be as good at it as any other debuffing powerset. He provided a valid basis for a comparative argument. Others can and have attempted to counter it, which is the rational thing to do. Suggesting that you can't debate things that are different and so the whole discussion ought to be dismissed is not.

If you prefer ground travel over air travel because it's safer, you have set a parameter for your objective to get to your destination. It's value as a parameter could be called subjective I suppose, but most people probably can agree that survival has compelling merit. Likewise, I could make arguments for air safety, or bring up another element like time efficiency. Our different perspectives don't preclude us from achieving a consensus. And if we don't achieve a consensus, that doesn't render the entire discussion worthless.