The_Haldanian

Anyone know of a channel I can use for the badgehunters on the Defiant dark side?

I ask, coz I'll be aiming for the troll and outcast boss badges, and might as well share the rare spawn mishes

Neutrino bolt is -12.5% for 5 secs
Irradiate is -30% for 15 secs
I think cosmic burst is also -30%.
Can't remember the others

I got all this from the US boards and their defender guides. It's in there somewhere.

Bah. I hate it when people talk sense.

I think I've traced my dislike of Shadow Fall to my current end-starved Sonic Def main, who is constantly ripping her hair out trying to get people to stay in the damned (so helpfully invisible) bubble, while copping their aggro as they run through spawns with your PBAoE debuff on them, getting her the Alpha strike which drops her bubble due to the synchronised mez. Yes, she's having.. fun.. right now.

My Fire/Dark seems to be her dark mirror. Everything she is not, including being considerate to people who won't stick together for the damned aura buffs whose effects they can't see, and don't appreciate. Even my Howling Twilight is slotted for offense. Basically she's cruel, and will squeeze respect out of them as they *cling* to her for her PBAoE heals!!

I'm also in dire need of the powerslot so she can test whirlwind on people desperately trying to leave rain of fire/tarpatch. In her spare time she also pulls the legs off puppies.

I'll leave Shadow Fall until late, and see how much I miss it.

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Bitter? Moi? Never!

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Indeed. I never did get Bruticus' other arm...

I'm not sure how much stealth will assist me when I'm laying about me with fireballs and as many rains of fire as I can squeeze from the heavens...

I'm also not that interested in resistance that has no lethal/smash component. It's that I have to worry about, as Tough on my Firetank proved to me.

My defence will consist of aim debuffs and slow-motion enemy panic, and faceplanting.

I'll also desperately need every drop of endurance I can get, so, no. Bye Bye Shadow Fall I think.

Desperately trying to cram more in a Fire/Dark.
I initially chose Shadow fall because stacking -perception with superspeed would be damned handy, and it should stack with Ghost Widow's shield, and everyone seems to choose it.

BUT...

I found only -NegRes stacks, big whoop, and superspeed is good enough for MOST stealthing anyway, and the defence I thought I gained has turned out to be 2.5%.

Is it just me or is Shadow Fall utter pants for a psychopathic pyromaniac with the rapid heals of Twilight Grasp?

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It's 4.66% for defenders unslotted, so about 7% slotted with 3 SO's, which is about 14% of attacks deflected. Unslotted Dispersion Bubble is 10% in comparison. Maneuvers is great and I'd definately take it on any defender over assault, which is only 18% base damage increase (effectively 9% of total damage on someone with 3 damage SO's)

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It is? I've got 2.5% base * 1.25 Defender buffboost in the hero planners I have. I think that includes the Prima I7 supplement. Got any sources? I'd guess it'd affect combat jumping/hover/stealth too?

#include <no_powersdata/std_rant.h>

But regarding a forcefielder, I've always hrmmmm'd evilly about teleporting with repulsion field on. Two ports could potentially crush any spawn into a small point.

And can you taunt from within a PFF?

I'm on a Sonic/Rad atm, and they're similar (except your shields/mez protection won't collapse when your Ally PBAoE gets you the Alpha's mezzes. GRRR!!).

Neutrino Bolt I slotted for damage. With its fast recharge/anim times it means you can sweep up all the near-death minions, saving your team from wasting time on them with overkills. 5 sec 12.5% def debuff

Irradiate(+Tactics) is damn handy. 30% 15sec def debuff IIRC
Or as a teammate said:
"I can't hit these guys!"
"I can fix that..." Ba-DING! ... *BOOM*!!!
"That's much better!!"

Maneuvers - people may dis it, but they kinda miss the point. Like Tough on a firetank (where +15% Res *halves* the remaining incoming damage!) that extra bit of buff on a bubbler takes a proportionally large chunk of whatever remains of an enemy's chance of hitting you.
Pulling figures out of my rear, say an even minion potshots you at base 50% chance, minus 35% of defense shield = 15% chance. With maneuvers adding even 5%, that will now cut out one *third* of all of your incoming minion fire.
Never mind their mezzes or lifestealing-selfheals.

Neutron Bomb and Irradiate will probably make you VERY unpopular with the enemy, But should rot large numbers of them to death quite nicely. Hovering *just* over their heads groups them delightfully for this. I don't have the Stamina or slots for this unfortunately.

Cosmic Burst I just picked up, and it does indeed appear to rock just as everybody said. A High damage, solid, reliable mez.

Proton Volley I'd love to have for the effects alone, but if I ask myself honestly if I actually needed it, I'd have to say no. *sigh*

Aim I'd only get if I wasn't slotting any Accuracies in my other powers. Might be worth trying with hasten+tactics for a self-accuracy-perpetuating rain of rapid emerald deathfire.

Atomic Blast - Yup! It doesn't do knockback and Mezzes/debuffs everyone on the spot. With PFF you'll be able to make much more of this than me, as you can take the alpha without getting knocked down/sleeped/laughed at.

Re playing with an icetank. Get hover - run behind him as he charges into a spawn and 'introduces himself', jump over his head and hover there. You can now AoE everything to emerald hell knowing they'll be unable to pull their attention from the tank (as long as he has CE etc).
If you hover just far enough from the ground they will try and run up to you and clout you, but get caught in the tank's aura before they can.
Your tank can even divert slots from accuracies if he'll always be with you.

Note on slotting rad debuffs - If you have enough rad powers, cycling fast enough, you simply aren't going to need any I think. You'll have -12.5's -30's and -20mumbles stacking all over the place (assuming you can get the first debuff to hit)

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Did you need Taunt or was blazing Aura enough to pull the mobs into a tight enough area to use Ice patch effectively?

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I think blazing aura may be one of the weaker taunt auras. It won't grab them for long if you move around everywhere, but if you jump into a crowd, and taunt the remoter ones, you'll be fine. If you are allowed time to herd, you'll have no trouble leading them all around a corner with a icepatch on it.
The ice patch slow debuff seems to annoy them too, which is good

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Did you use Fiery Embrace and is it worth it as your using Burn for most of your damage?


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Remember it buffs all attacks, not just fire. It just buffs fire longer.
I found it worked particularly nicely with a frost cone too.
It will buff burn now too, in case you were worried.

Okay, this hero planner needs a slap then [img]/uk/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Apparently the presence pool fear powers contains accuracy debuffs.

Does anyone have any idea what strength they'd be?
Worth slotting?
Would they last as long as the fear effect, or is their duration independant of that?

I'm eyeing them in combination with the acc debuffs in liquefy, and wondering if I can pull it off...

I must be missing something.
I'm in a tossup whether to dump Grant Invis for the Presence pool and make for Invoke Panic.

So far, I've made my teammates translucent, and given them a pathetic defence bonus.

No team I've been on so far has cared about stealthing, they just want to kill things.

I've turned teammates who've popped res-pills invisible, so they could rest in battle in safety. I think that's the most use it's been so far.

It probably allows them first strike. But then, they get that anyway.

Can someone please tell me what I'm missing?!? What use is Grant Invisibility???

Wow. Thanks for the highly informative and very helpful answers

Okeydokey - looks like I need to fly to keep out of melee, and put some slots in rest, to recharge behind pillars a lot, quickly. Since I won't have stamina

I may also have to squeeze whatever defence I can muster out of the power pool to stay alive a little longer.

One last question maybe. Is rad secondary actually *useful* for debuffs, or is everyone worth their salt already able to pound purple when under a Tactics aura?

The character concept is generally aimed at helping a team take on impossible purples and live, hence resistance buff/debuffs and enemy defence debuffs.

Still wondering whether I should toss /rad for /sonic... on the other hand, thinking about it, this could be quite entertaining for PvP...

I'm rolling a Sonic/Rad def, but I'm getting a tad nervous and I need someone to help me clear up a few things:

Does the Sonic ally-anchored debuff AoE cause aggro to *you* and not the anchor ally, and is that aggro serious?

Ditto for the ally-anchored repulsion field.

Has anyone found the repulsion to be of any use, or does it simply exhaust you?

Do your ally-anchored and PB AoE's switch off/have no effect when you rest?

Do you truly have no sleep resistance, and is Health really no help with that?

Does anyone know how res debuffs work on higher level enemies: e.g.
<ul type="square">[*]a +4 with 50% resistance to you due to level, when sapped by -40% resistance, turns into only 10% resistance to you, [*]or does the debuff only amplify the percentage of damage that gets through? i.e. 50-(40*'50%')= 30% resistance to you?[/list]All resistance debuffs are unenhanceable - yes? -15% AoE and -25% Single target?

So, with all of the above, should I have gone /dark to dodge the inevitable aggro, or /sonic, because the primary res debuffs just aren't enough, instead of /rad which is going to debuff them even more and turn me into a massive aggro magnet?

Don't like the look of this.....

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I would take the fighting pool purely for the tough power. Tough stacks with Fire shields Slash/Lethal resistance to go from about 50% to about 70%. As a result this reduces incoming damage of the most common damage types by about 40%. It does cost more than one of the firey aura shields and so probably needs a end red or 2 as well as the 3 slots for damage resistance. Whether this is worhtwhile is up to you, but in my book it seems to be.

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God yes! Take tough!

It effectively halves the damage you're taking from big lethal/smashers, and there are some VERY HEAVY HITTERS in that department that I would not survive against without it. They'd hurt faster than I'd heal. For those you DO need it against, you can typically drop your plasma shields, as stuns accompany melee attacks (which your fireshield blocks), not the holds/sleeps your plasma blocks.

That said, I spend *at least* 95% of my game time with it off, and only use it if I'm in too deep, or tanking an AV, so I only have it slotted for resistance.

The downside is needing a prerequisite. My build actually needed another melee, so boxing got the nod, and the occasional disorient drops toggles which can be very handy indeed. It only seems to need one accuracy SO too.

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If it doesn't get rid of the immob problem I'm probably going to ditch the toon, tanking without immob protection is a nightmare. It's not as though I have much to lose.


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Oh the immob protection seems effectively permanent - it lasts longer than the burn patch and I've only seen multiple CoT dark tentacles actually manage to snare me, and using burn always breaks any existing immob AFAICS.

I've been kinda spoilt playing this game so long without worrying about mez effects at all

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a flying tank&gt;.&gt;

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Damn straight a flying tank!

It's amusing seeing GM's and AV's trying to climb trees to get at you, while permanently ignoring the entire rest of your team

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AFAIK you can use it flying, as long as you are close to the ground.

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I wish!

I've tried, but it just doesn't happen, so I drop hover, initiate burn or icepatch, and get knocked back which leaves my burn or icepatch in midair between where I started, and where I landed. This is undesirable, and seemingly inescapable, unless you want to pop BF's beforehand.

If anyone has EVER landed eiter patch while hovering, please enlighten me. Otherwise, those descriptions are great big fibs and always have been. I've even /bug'd them.

Anyone know how long it takes for them to a) notice b) diagnose c) fix a smoking server?

Any past record?

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Irradiate lasts about 30s. Certainly a useful duration.

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.. which contradicts the previous replier ..
Ah, and now I've just found a US post saying 15 seconds.. lovely..

*chews on table*
*shakes fist at sky*

We hates uncertainty, don't we preciouss!
Nasty niggly proddy things, when we's only trying to builds our little peoples, Yess?
We's is only wanting to makes the debuff perma, oh yes, but the nasty statesmans he steals the numbers away!! DOOOOOMs us he does!!
Now we don't knows whether to gets hasten, or recharges or whether we's is just chasing the red heronses!

Nasty statesmans... hiding the preciouss numberses. We hates it.

Is the Arena/PvP the only way to measure debuff duration?

I ask because I started up a Sonic/Rad, picked up Irradiate, and noted the glowy debuff effects on the minions lasted about a second, then disappeared.

I take it the effects are longer than that are the game is blatently misleading and probably bugged, flagged, and not fixed since I1.

(Unless they've nerfed/broken it recently)

Only tried my Fire/Ice in PvP once out of curiosity. This was what I found:

Ice Patch didn't affect very many people. Freezing Touch + Burn worked much more often. It interupts stalkers instantly tho, immune or not.

Hastened Aid Self + Healing Flames makes you really.. really.. really hard to kill.

Phoenix is fun. It overloads all mez protection eventually and drops their toggles.
Hastened Phoenix is funner.
HALO dropping onto enemy positions, getting droned, and Phoenixing a startled passerby from your nonexistant corpse is also amusing (Your Phoenix invulnerability protects you from drones too)

And finally, I couldn't kill anybody (not optimised for single target damage unfortunately).
But they couldn't kill me either (unless the end drained me, but I don't have stamina)

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Well, /bind b "powexec_name speed_boost" works just fine.

Putting a space in the power name would imply 2 arguments, but powexec_name only takes one.

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The command language is batty. Some commands, like powexec_name can take a sequence of words as args and will always treat it as one.
The underscore working is interesting. My guess is the power is known by two names internally.

Don't for one moment think this language is designed properly

macro_slot is completely broken for example. It won't parse unless typed on the command line, and then it puts your macro in the wrong slot!

Dammit - that command would have been *so* *useful*!!

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Siphon Speed issues I get, yep that can indeed be a pain...

IR... nope, still not convinced. Leaping requires you to check around and press the jump key in order to do your jumping. You can't leave your toon to get where they need to get to on their own. It requires almost the same careful consideration of where you are going as IR.

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Brick. Space bar. Nuff said.

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Or type /++up in the console .. or bind it. Tiz handy.

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Two points:

You need to be on or very near the ground to use Burn (not that it's worth taking any more...)

Post-ED, 3-slotted hover is quite slow (I'm assuming you will 3 slot it to use as a combat travel power). It might be worth checking on test whether you can live with the slow speed or not.

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Well, for the life of me, I can't get Burn or Icepatch to trigger while hovering.
I consider the 'near ground' description to be utter cobblers. I was *not* happy. If anyone has seen this work, please tell me! I'm fed up with icepatches firing off in mid-air as I go flying when I drop hover.

Otherwise, a one-slotted hover is very very handy for staying put and holding aggro under wave upon wave of knockback hits. It works like a charm. Half normal runspeed tho, but still a godsend with superspeed. As far as I can tell you just backflip and don't otherwise move. Backflip is a fraction of the downtime of a knockback.

Two slotted, you match normal runspeed. A *significant* speed increase. Very usable in fights. Makes a mockery of caltrops. I never needed a third slot.

No, it's not a travel power, but in combo with superspeed, it's a thing of beauty.

I bound mine to a close key and toggle it on and off constantly to match circumstances. This avoids straining my non-stamina endurance.

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You won't be killing very much with it I'm afraid

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Pfah! I beg to differ.

*If* you confine your opponent in close quarters, they get smacked with wave after stacking mezzing wave of damage. I'd be interested in the BI for that lot.

Used it as the deathstroke for an annoying phasing +3 Fake Nem the other day by deliberately dropping my toggles. Unorthodox approach, maybe

Wheeeee! Tanker fights! My turn!

Well, as I only have one (real) char, my beloved Fire/Ice tank, and can still remember the selection process, my mind went summat like this:

Inv: Looks kinda complicated.
Stone: Looks too easy.
Ice: Looks like my costume would go away.
Fire: Looks different.

So I chose fire, and chose Ice to make Burn work.

Now Fire *is* weaker than the others in many cases, so I picked up Tough which I do use if I get in over my head, which is often in trials and TF's. I would be hard pressed to drop it. I think it about halves your commonly received damage.

Ice patch UTTERLY DECIMATES the amount of damage you take. As well as providing an instant barbeque patio. So this matches fire very, very well.

Knockback is a SERIOUS pain in the [censored]. My burn and ice patches can often be spotted in mid air. Only Acrobatics and Hover will help you with it. I chose hover and used SS for speed and stealth. I like it, a lot! (I'd like it better if Burn/icepatch power descriptions didn't lie about ground proximity)

If you get Aid Self, and slot it fully, you are much, much, much, MUCH harder to take down. Combined with Healing Flames your health goes down, but goes up even more.

I can now herd purples, and massacre them in confined spaces while my health yoyo's up and down. THAT is a buzz!

Endurance is a problem without Stamina, but if you herd larger numbers, your AoE's will kill more for the same endurance.

But what I like most about my tank, is that when I fall, kicking and screaming, in the middle of a pitched knife-edge battle (which for any other tank would mean a teamwipe) for the firetank with phoenix, it means you're going to win and you watch as even your toughest opponents are killed or mezzed out of the battle long enough for your team to do what must be done.

With consume, self heals, and self res, you never, ever, need to stop. Entering a battle on little end and low health is fixed with two clicks. You just keep on keeping on. With hasten you're *even harder* to stop.

So yes, I recommend a Fire/Ice tank It's a blast.
Otherwise, Ice.