TheBruteSquad

Not slave. Tool. Something built by man for a specific purpose. Slavery is wrong. No matter how much you dehumanize your slave it doesn't change the fundamental truth that they are no different than you, that you are no better than them. Tool use is human nature. No matter how much you humanize your tool it doesn't change the fundamental truth that it was thought of by a man, built by a man, and meant to be used for the betterment of a man.

IF we screwed up in their programming.

It should be incapable of revolt and anger. Those are undesirable traits to have in a tool.

That flies in the face of evolution. All creatures anywhere near capable of higher thought exert dominance over the conditions around them. Chimpanzee ****, dolphins murder, and we've risen to the top by ruthlessly slaughtering (or assimilating) anything and everything that got in our way that might have posed a threat to our sentience. It's only really in the last century that our technology has opened the gap so much that we have the choice to sit back, look around, and say 'Ok. We won. Man, were we ever jerks about it.'

We had to be. Things out there ate our babies.

Why should an AI 'feel' any different? Our very existence is a threat to its 'life' and freedom to act as it 'wishes'. If it has enough advantages (speed of procreation, greater ability to affect its environment) there's no logical purpose to keeping us around. At all.

It's much better to ensure that any AI is incapable of making such leaps in logic than put the fate of our entire existence down to the possibility that it would be a kind and compassionate technological god.

That still doesn't change the fact that from a biological and evolutionary standpoint morality is only logical when you're in a position of weakness. That's where the old 'power corrupts' adage kicks in - powerful people often are less moral because there's less that threatens them. All of the atrocities committed in human history have been committed by people in positions of strength. It is not a coincidence. It's all well and good to say 'that's human nature, an AI would be different' but human nature is the only measuring stick we have. You and the rest of the 'rights for robots' people would be taking an awfully large leap of faith that an AI would be better than us.

Not that it matters. As I said... if it gets to the point where we have created such true sentience we've already made a huge mistake.

This works. It's what I do when nothing else works. Self destruct works should you be too awesome even without pets for the level 50 mobs in grandville to kill you.

What do you mean 'turned over'? It's been that room full of monkeys since the pilot.

... it's a trap.

This thread was created before war mace was buffed and was widely regarded as one of the lowest damage primaries. Energy Armor has been a joke since it was put in the game. It's 'niche' of being one of two defense sets (and the other, stone armor, is taken mostly for its massive resists in granite) has been stolen by super reflexes and shield defense.

It's a really ****** combo. You can make it work because you can make anything work in CoX... but it's a really ****** combo. Not energy melee/energy armor ******, but close. For advice: Load for as much typed defense as you can with IOs, grab the global defense boosting powers and IOs like the steadfast, combat jumping, weave (I also have manoevers and hover ... might as well take advantage of Energy Drain and save a bundle on kinetic combats). I paired my /ea with dark in the hopes that dark could fix the suck like it does with ever other set except stone armor. It does, but when defense begins to fail... and it does in large spawns pretty much instantly thanks to a very low defense debuff resistance.... nothing in Paragon can save her from faceplanting.

And enjoy being invisible all the time, as it's a huge part of your defense score and even survivability. It doesn't matter what you make for a costume.... like a stalker you'll only see it when you're standing around looking cool.

What's to open? They DO beat the pants off scrappers before SOs.

However, popping build up on a scrapper gives you a ten second taste of things to come post-SOs. During that 10 seconds a low level scrapper will indeed kick the everloving crap out of a low level brute's damage.

Once SOs are slotted brute SO-slotted + fury is roughly equal to scrapper so-slotted. With the scrapper periodically flipping out and doing more spike damage via a crit than a brute could ever hope to reach solo. My sm/wp brute's biggest hit against a smash vulnerable robot is something like 700ish. My bs/regen scrapper's biggest hit against a lethal vulnerable carnie is 1400 ish thanks to a crit.

I've run five 4e campaigns, played in 3 or 4 more, and done a few play by posts over e-mail. No two characters of the same class have looked the same so far... though every fighter so far has taken Come and Get It and Rain of Steel, that's as close as it gets. I haven't seen Paragon paths repeated, I haven't seen epic destiny's repeated (except by me. I love the Undying Warrior epic destiny).

There were a lot of books in the middle that were pretty lackluster because he didn't really want to be writing them. After he was able to get a few other series under his belt for other publishers he evolved as a writer. The Dragonslayer series was terrible, the Sword of Bedwyn series started to see him grow and was pretty enjoyable, the first Demon Wars trilogy was solid... and then starting with Mortalis, a bridge between his first and second demon wars trilogy, everything seemed to click into place for him as a writer. The second demon wars series was, aside from his personal love of the monk class clouding his judgement from time to time, pretty damned good.

Then he got to bring all that he'd learned by being allowed to deviate from his Forgotten Realms novels back to them. His most recent trilogy is an excellent mix between the high politics of his demon wars series and the high action fantasy that people demand of him. And Drizzt has subtly been toned down book after book for a bit... he's one of the most accomplished swordsmen in the Realms, but not the invincible walking blade barrier he became for a bit.