Terrycloth

Fire/Ice is a good blaster combo.

/icy is a really, really slow dom set to solo with. I was doing mind/icy but I'd expect fire/icy to be even worse since mind/ has some extra attacks to help out.

fire/ is a good corruptor set, but /cold is bad for soloing until you get sleet. Really really bad. 'You might as well be playing an /ice blaster because then you'd at least get ice patch' bad.

And on a team... what set you're playing is not the main consideration for levelling speed. So, I think the fire/ice blaster wins here.

For me it's also the most fun but... YMMV. fire/icy dom is by far the safest of the three. I guess mostly I just hate /cold. SO MUCH.

I don't know, I'm worried that this might dilute player choice and lead to overall homogenization. I mean, the new things they'd be adding to the sets would probably be reskins of stuff from other sets, and the last thing I want is for power set choice to be essentially cosmetic.

I'd suggest an energy blaster. It's the bog-standard baseline blaster set and the random knockdown makes them pretty durable.

Sonic's another good choice; Siren's Song is an I-win button if you're careful. It helps not be frustrated but not be bored either (by being able to faceroll with a scrapper).

Why blaster? Blasters are fun to solo. By the time they stop being fun they'll probably be ready to start another character anyway.

If they're planning to team a lot, they should do some sort of defender or corruptor instead of a blaster, though.

Oh, or mind controllers or doms. Mind is a fun set, with powers like 'mez boss instantly' and 'make enemies kill themselves without risk'.

I think they really need to give all the T3 single target damage powers blaze-like activation times. Or at least all the ones that don't also have a huge stun or something attached.

Bots/Traps MM. OH MY GOD. This is the kind of combo where you fall asleep and still win the fight, and only move on to the next group when your FFGen explodes and wakes you up.

FF/Archery defender. Using too-low-damage attacks against too-high-hp enemies is something I call 'chopping wood'. It isn't fun at all. Usually, you end up doing it because someone decides to go up against +4s or higher. Or, you can play this character.

Grav/TA controller... maybe with the new grav it would be playable. But for me it was just sooo... slow... to... do... anything... and... now... I... have... to... draw... my... bow... again...

VEATs before level 24 (but at level 24 they get a lot more interesting). So... I can shoot them with my gun, shoot them with my gun multiple times, or hit them with the butt of my gun? And the last one is the better attack?

Yeah. Change ET and TF back, and energy melee would be fun again.

It would break the 'rules', but that's what makes it fun. The best attacks in a lot of sets break the rules.

I have an EM stalker I tried to play after the stalker changes for I22, and I couldn't get AS to crit because the assassin's focus would fade while waiting for the ultra-long animations for TF and ET to play.

I'm not a big MM player, but...

Thugs/Poison: So painfully awful I never got past level 20.
Necro/Poison: So painfully awful I never got past level 20.
Beast/Poison: Okay, this one worked.

Bots/Traps: So painfully boring I never got past level 20.
Demons/Dark: Okay, this one worked.

Beasts seem significantly more durable than Demons but that might be because I've mostly solo'd with the beasts and teamed with the demons, and MM pets are always more fragile on a team.

Aesthetically, I like the wolves and lions better than giant skull-headed skinless demon creatures.

The demons definately do more damage though.

Blaster definately. Archery is not the highest damage thing in the world, and it's one of the sets that relies on firing lots of fast shots continuously -- even its aoe uses the 'fire often for relatively low damage' method until 32. If you're taking time out to use your secondary a lot it's just painful, especially with redraw.

Maybe A/TA gets good eventually, but I never managed to stick with it. I did get an archery/devices blaster up to the high 30s and it was a lot of fun. Stunning shot + taser (short ranged, but lightning-fast activation) makes soloing a breeze. Caltrops helps a ton too.

/energy wouldn't be my first choice to go with archery but it does also have stuns at least?

Personally I think they should just undo the nerfs and allow certain individual powers to be overpowered as long as the powersets don't get out of line. OP *characters* can be a problem but OP *powers* are fun to use, and EM was never ridiculously awesome.

It just got caught up in the senseless normalization mess, but while sets like Stone Melee still had a 'thing' after all their attacks were nerfed, EM is just useless now.

I still play my EM/ninja stalker now and then but it just makes me sad. v.v

...if you want a suggestion that might actually happen, make stun an 0.5 second animation attack (or whatever the 'really fast' value is). Really fast pure control is usable, even on scrappers. I do like the 'kill NAO and *then* wait' idea for ET too.

It's decent for any controller who wants Burnout. Any random pool melee attack is a decent soloing aid, you probably don't have a full attack chain without needlessly spamming controls that aren't even slotted for damage (and maybe not even then), so its lowish DPA doesn't matter, and since you're punching statues you don't care too much about its lack of knockup.

So you can skip superspeed and go flurry/hasten/burnout.

I went with Beam/Ice for my blaster because of the weapon redraw/cone + melee=suck thing. /ice's melee is skippable, and it has Shiver and Ice Patch to keep things at a distance where you can cone them repeatedly.

So far I've only ever played it in groups, though. I should try soloing to see how well it actually works. It *seems* to work. I mean, ice patch is beautiful in groups where someone else already took the aggro, but I already knew that. q:3

I usually slot them for resist because the defense is worthless, and they fill part of the hole left by the epic pool shields that generally only cover smashing/lethal. I don't slot them for *either* until I'm really high level and have slots to spare, though.

Unslotted, having a bunch of them stacked against someone using one of the relevant damage types is glorious. n.n Against generic folks where only the defense applies, even three of them stacked is unnoticeable. This is from pressure cooker teams; I think their official build guide said to slot for defense though.

You want it to work this way when you have the real enemy groups selected and they have 10 different versions of the same critter at 5 level intervals. You don't want to have a level 1 mission against council putting the players up against scaled down level 50 council!

It really does suck when you want to have a partially custom and partially standard group, though -- the auto-exemp just doesn't happen since custom critters are 1-54 and can't be set otherwise.

Salt crystals are skippable for sure.

You don't need the single-target immobilize. A pool melee attack is a better damage option if you need damage, and can also double as a travel starter if you want, although you probably want hasten anyway.

You don't need the AoE immobilize but it's useful as an immobilize or for containment sometimes. I think it still has -fly? It's always skippable, and definately should be skipped if your secondary is something like Storm. Stalagmites is up often enough to give AoE containment for epic pools.

For some secondaries you don't need quicksand -- quicksand gives movement slow and -def. Radiation, for example, has slow and -def already, as side effects of better powers, so quicksand would be totally redundant. Storm is another secondary where you don't want quicksand, because Snow Storm and Freezing Rain do the job and also have other effects. Anything else, you probably want it.

Not really.

[ QUOTE ]
Ummm... You are aware that Beanbag is a Disorient, while Cryo Freeze Ray is a Hold, aren't you? Expecting them to stack is like a Controller expecting their Immobilizes to stack with their Holds. Different kind of mez entirely.

[/ QUOTE ]

Different but basically interchangeable except for the stacking.

Since this is the set that's supposed to complement Assault Rifle (since it, like, uses the assault rifle for its attacks, and is the only one that doesn't cause redraw as a result), why did they give it an inconsistent and therefore non-stacking mez type? Cryo Freeze Ray should have been a disorient to stack with beanbag.

At the very least, there should be *some* app that gives a disorient to stack with beanbag (and the archery and sonic stuns too).

Stacking bt firing it off twice is *okay* if you can really do that (with an app hold? WOW -- none of the villain app holds even come close to that), but it's nowhere near as good as having two holds you can fire off one right after another.

Especially when you're trying to stop a PP from godmoding while the rest of the team blithely beats it down to the sliver of health which triggers 2 minutes of boredom.

Having lots of holds on a blaster is nice when you're up against groups with problem lieutenants (controllers tend to focus on AoE control on teams, I've noticed), but usually two is plenty (because it lets you hold PPs to keep them from godmoding).

Anyway, my assault rifle/fire blaster thinks:
Sleep Grenade: Ugh, this sucks.
Cryo Freeze: Whhhhhy doesn't this stack with beanbag? Isn't this supposed to be the set to complement AR?
Body Armor: Did I forget to turn on my toggle? Oh wait.
LRM: Heehee, this is a lot of fun, especially with full auto. Looong recharge though.
Surveillance: Not especially noticeable, but peeking at stuff is nice.

I skipped Cryo Freeze Ray because of the not-stacking issue, but I think I'm going to swap out the sleep grenade instead because it's really useless. Or maybe body armor, since it's really pretty lame.

Farming is 'doing the same thing over and over'. As if you were hoeing rows in a field on a farm. The devs usually try to stop farming more than just powerlevelling, because it's boring and people tend to burn out and stop playing the game.

It's like, EVE. You'll be there focused on maximizing your ISK with missions or whatever, and then one day you wake up and say 'this is boring, I'm just doing the same thing over and over' and never play again.

MA farms are especially nasty because people are using exploits to make them a lot more *effective* than normal play. If farming is 20% or even 100% faster than normal play that doesn't bore you to tears, most people aren't going to bother with it. If it's 10000% faster, people get hooked on the crack and it's hard to find people doing anything else.

No.

If there's no XP, the stories won't get played. I sort of feel like I'm wasting my time if I play a mission that won't give me XP -- there's no way I'd lead a pickup group or even a group of my friends through missions that wouldn't give XP. It's just mean.

I think if worst comes to worst with the farming, there are ham-handed things the devs could do that fall way short of that -- like, 'you can't get XP faster than X in mission architect' or something.

Since she's not attackable, the mission wouldn't break in any way if she was spawned at 40 (her minimum) even though the mission level was 5. I know their engine could handle that because sometimes in normal content you get spawns turning up that way -- all they'd need to do is change the mission editor (or whatever's computing the level range) to not pay attention to non-combat hostages.

[ QUOTE ]
So, all spawning locations are divided into two kinds, then? So if I want all of my spawn locations to be empty until triggered, I will need to use both ambushes AND battles? Hmm... That might be problematic if the mission doesn't entail enemies battling each other or any allies to be had. I was really looking at an ambush mission like the Protect Lady Grey or Ambush Nocturne ones. Have to play around with it, I suppose.

[/ QUOTE ]

There are some maps that only have one type or the other, but you could also do things like optional defend object objectives? Although those seem to spawn an immediate automatic ambush when you trigger them, so they're dangerous to have scattered around.

PvP experience:
#1: "Hmm, these people are all shooting each other. Maybe I'll snipe that one, he's at low health. AHH, someone random mezzed me..." ran away.
#2: "Let's bait those stalkers, tell me if you see one about to kill me." *assassinate* "You newb! Why didn't you warn me!?" "Uh... I didn't see him either?" kicked from team
#3: "Wow, the enemies at this meteor are sure burning through my health fast... oh, one of them's a scrapper." ran away
#4: "ARGH, siphon speed ran out, I'll just drain from one of these mobs..." *held by random passerby* *mobs kill me*
#5: "I'm going to finish this patrol mission if it kills me" *assassin strike, die*
#6: "[censored] it, I'm just going to kill the next person I see." Long battle against a brute involving many many siphon speeds, but I can't do any damage to him at all, eventually he runs away.
#7: "Okay, four stalkers camping the edge of the safe zone in warburg. I'll teleport in, lay down a tar patch, and when the stalkers fail to assassinate me I'll blast them!" Worked like a charm, except that none of my attacks could hit, so he just ran away.

PvP would suck a lot less if you didn't need a completely different build to even compete. An efficient PvE build is 100% useless for PvP, because you don't have the acc to hit ANYONE.

I don't know what they were thinking reducing accuracy against other players... all it does is create a huge gap between PvP-enabled builds and everyone else.

[ QUOTE ]
Since Targetting Drone is a toggle power, the +DMG would be much lower that 100% anyway. I would say that it needs to be lower even than Rage's 80%. Cut it down to 50% or lower and I doubt it'll be greatly overpowered with the inclusion of +perception in the comparison.

If nothing else, remove some of the To Hit and transfer it over to Damage. It that's what it takes to keep the damage boost around 50%, I think that would be fine.

[/ QUOTE ]

Uh... a constant 50% damage boost would be overpowered compared to what anyone else gets. The existing equivalent to build up-as-a-perma-able-power is claws/' follow up, which gives +33% damage and some accuracy.

The +acc on targetting drone is already pretty low, lowering it further would kind of suck.

You get "hide" status to everyone letting you AS or critical anyone, because it's really a status on you, not them, and doesn't matter if they can see you.

You aren't actually hidden (as in 'stealthed, untargetable' ,etc) from anyone but your target.