TwilightPhoenix

If the Devs are going to go with a big defense busting route on all future content, then they really ought to look at SR again. It's not the set's fault that it's a one-trick pony with a trick that turned out so good everyone else copied it, even if they have a plethora of other tricks themselves. Beyond defense, SR natively only has scaling resistance to fall back on and it's pretty safe to say those won't save anyone. Tough as well as HP and Regen from IO sets help, but those won't keep a SR standing when his main mitigation is nullified.

How would I change it? I don't know, I'm not going to worry too much about it until I20 hits and we see what they pull out then. For all I know anti-defense may just be this time around and the next TF may have an AV with unresistable damage but normal hit rate.

You might also consider frakenslotting attacks. Ignore set bonuses, grab IOs with the enhancement values you want from different sets, and stick them in there. You won't gain much in the way of set bonuses, other than random strays that may or may not be helpful, you can easily get six slots worth of enhancements in three or four slots.

Also, if you're having endurance issues, Hasten is bad. Very bad. Not only will attacks be recharging faster, meaning increased end usage, it also has a crash of 15 end which can really hurt if it happens at a critical moment if you're not very end efficient yet.

You may also consider looking at the Dark and Electric APPs. Both have a PBAoE end drain power that can refill you every so often. Electric especially, since its end drain is auto hit. Just shove a bunch of recharge in it and you'll have far fewer end problems. It's more effective than Conserve Power by far. Electric also as Thunderstrike (the move, not the IO) which is similar to Total Focus but also PBAoE. So, you won't entirely lose your favorite power.

To be blunt, the fact you went through six blues for one target that isn't sapping you, even if it is a 30% resistant boss, screams you're doing something wrong.

Improve your slotting. Something like 3 dmg, 2 acc, 1 end or 2 dmg, 2 acc, 2 end or 2 dmg, 2 acc, 1 end, 1 rech. You're much better off landing decent blows at decent accuracy with decent endurance usage than amazing little usage but piddling damage and accuracy. Also, accuracy is more efficient than endurance reduction simply because a missed attack is wasted endurance, no matter how little you used.

Unslot those useless attacks. Boxing? No, drop it. Total Focus? As much as I love it, it's pretty useless without a good source of damaging buffing on a Defender. Air Superiority? Some people swear by it, but personally I ignore it. If you want to keep someone on their back, your Force Bolt is safer and more accurate. Sniper Blast? Sniping attacks are cool, but hardly efficient.

Get Aim. And ED recharge cap it. That period where your damage and to-hit is buffed is a period where you're using your endurance much more efficiently.

You shouldn't be going down in three-hits from a Rikti boss unless they're smacking you with that sword. Hover blast him or keep him on his back. Or get and use Force Bubble. You can shut off some of those excess toggles to make things easier on the blue bar.

Don't use AoE/Cone attacks on a single target. It's one of the least endurance efficient ways to fight (and is the biggest reason I'm suspecting why your burning through your blue bar so fast).

Finally, turn off Sprint, Fly, etc.

Here's a trio of mine. I can grab other screenies if needed.

Isaac Tigerheart, my soldier, first in his normal uniform and then in gear for winter.







Ahnya, my ratgirl, who I don't have a Christmas outfit for. Her rat tail is hiding in this screenie.





And finally Lenari, my whimsical fairy. While she does dress up for Christmas in the second screenshot, she doesn't quite understand you're supposed to wear more in the cold, not less.

I keep my defenses monitored so I can spot cascading failures before they become deadly, so I did check in the fight to see if that was it. Unless I missed a massive defense debuff, it's not. I got debuffed about 1% or less from both her and the floating swords. Not sure if that was one or more hits, the fight was a little too frantic to keep track and I wasn't thinking to monitor it that closely.

I partially suspect she might have been given higher to-hit to compensate for people running soft-capped Blasters and such. The other mobs in the TF seem to hit much more often too, though I didn't have a hit-roll tab set-up until well into the BM battle. Again, something to check in a future run. Could have also just been pure attack saturation combined with high damage for those though as the Apex mobs are pretty big and the War Walkers only hit me a couple of times. In fact, I think the only other point I had problems getting hit a lot was with the hydra tentacles around the pylons in the first mission.

Definitely. I was even making sure everyone else on the TF had it slotted so that nobody would be functionally useless. +4s are hard enough, I can't even imagine fighting +8s, let alone an uber +8 AV.

I do. I did lose a little bit of health and regen when I specced out of Aid Self, but nothing significant other than the self-heal which wouldn't have helped when she was hitting me at range for 800 a pop every few seconds when she had aggro on me. Tried spamming -Range with Confront on her, but half the time it didn't seem to do much. Probably purple patch nerfing my debuff. Or maybe it just felt like it was not doing much since her crossbow animation was slow enough I could run across the area before she fired, thanks to the Kin.

If someone doesn't beat me to it, next time I fight her I'm bringing a power analyzer to see if her hit odds are native or something else is giving it to her. I want to say she was stronger the second time she attacked since we took her down relatively easily the first time.

If you haven't done the Apex yet and want to go into the final fight blind, then spoilers ahead.


I tried an Apex TF today. It didn't quite work out, but that's besides the point. Battle Maiden in that tf makes me a sad Scrapper. I'm a soft-capped BS/SR Scrapper, so I shouldn't have many issues with BM's direct attacks, just gotta avoid the death patches, right? So painfully wrong! She had a 47% chance to hit me with all of my defenses up! I might as well had ran up to any other AV with all my toggles off for all the good my defense made. On top of that, she hit hard enough to three-shot me at range with her crossbow. Two-shots in melee, but only thanks to the anti-one shot code (and I'm just shy of 1.8k HP too). I doubt I've ever felt so unscrapper-like before. Felt more like a Blaster with only two poorly slotted ranged attacks.

Yeah, basically a brief rant about how an AV who seems to have 90% native hit chance makes my /SR Scrapper feel a little useless. Especially when I've killed other AVs on the toon.

So, as of last night I now have my shiny common alpha boost. However, as we know, it splits into two paths. At present with us only being able to do up to uncommons, one path looks more appealing right now, but once the rares and higher start to show, the other would be the better pick for me. So, the question is, if in the future I decided I wanted to switch paths, would I be able to do something like break down my uncommon boost to make the alternate uncommon or would I need to start over from scratch to go into the other branch?

Did a LGTF right after getting my alpha slot. Instead of speeding through, we cleaned up almost every mob in every mission except the Hami raid. Took a bit longer than the usual TF, but I think everyone on that team walked away with someone slotted in their alpha slot.

Fallout. "Oh, but it's too morbid!" "But it requires a dead ally!" Silly excuses, we all know the Blaster is going to face plant anyway! Besides, have you ever had someone volunteer to be your portable bomb? Who cares if you're short one person when every other mob is going to either die instantly or be debuffed to uselessness? Toss in Aim, Vengeance, and Power Build Up or Soul Drain and you'll soon find yourself cackling maniacally! Also recommend Recall Friend for maximum positioning.

Personally, for TD, I'd just have it boost all the snipes in all the blast sets. Except for the ones lacking a snipe, in which it should go into some appropriate power at a lower value. Not a fan of shoving a damage enhancement into the drone, as I'd rather give build-up compensation to a stealth strike in Cloaking Device. Well, maybe not entirely. It'd take a lot of work since every Blaster power would need to be edited and so would probably never happen, but I'd be fine with TD giving a small chance for critical hits or a weaker version thereof with the reasoning being TD allowing you to aim for vitals much more easily or somesuch.

For Cloaking Device, I'd say change the defense to that 5% ranged idea mentioned above and toss in a stealth strike to help make up for Device's lack of Build Up. The rest would either be a bit much and/or out of place in this power and doing all of it would certainly be too much. Yes, even the end cost. If nothing was changed, then the end could go down, but otherwise on top of a stealth strike, lowered end might not be a good idea.

Hibernate in PvE, especially on a non-Tanker. Sure, it's a great "OH CRAP!" power, but have you ever tried using it to tank alpha-strikes, regardless of which AT you're on? Works great with Fly when the ceiling is large enough that you can safely fly over to about the middle of the mob, hit Hiber, and drop in for a visit and laugh at the attacks.


Also, Wormhole. Done right and the team may never notice you spamming it every time it's up.

If we're going to have vet Sidekick summons, we need more options then that! Not all sidekicks are useless through their fear!

I'd say something like these...

Cowardly sidekick - Cowers during combat
Useless sidekick - Stands and watches
Supportive sidekick - /e cheer during combat
Brave sidekick - Runs up to enemies and uses Brawl. Except his Brawl does zero damage, even to something at -49 to your current level
Taunting sidekick - uses emotes like taunt, taunt 2, and crackknuckles, doesn't actually taunt

I'm trying to figure out why taking longer to level up is an achievement of sorts. Going from one to fifty requires nothing but hitting things until they die and drop XP. It doesn't matter how hard they are, just that they drop XP. A slower leveling speed isn't harder at all. It just takes longer. It's no different than, say, driving. You can drive from one city to another at forty miles a hour or fifty miles a hour. Getting there at forty MPH isn't any harder than fifty, it'll just take longer and you'll be going slower.

In my opinion, and you're free to disagree with it, is leveling up to the level cap isn't an achievement in the sense of difficulty. It's more of a time investment. It's not hard. An achievement in this game would be doing something hard, like duoing a LGTF, running an ITF in twenty minutes, winning a big PvP tournament, or becoming Mr./Mrs Paragon City. Those are brag worthy in my opinion, not beating up the same mobs at a slower rate.

No, but it's about as likely. Or less. Getting that guy to post would be the equivalent to getting whoever was a few levels above War Witch to post. And likely a few levels above whatever typical marketing rep we'd be more likely to get, such as Black Pebble.

Anyway, my point is, if players in Aion can get someone what high up who's not directly involved in development to post, it'd be possible to get someone not directly involved in development to post here (or again really, we did have Black Pebble for a bit). Though, it may be harder for us since CoX players aren't nearly as disgruntled as Aion players were at the time of my linked post.

Basically, some other options for the arena to go a long with No Heal Decay, No Travel Suppression, No Inspirations, etc. These will, of course, default to not being enabled. The idea behind is, for those who want to do the occasional duel but with a bit more balance in terms of enhancements, they could use these. If you had no interest in these options, you could leave them off and pretend they never existed.


Disable Incarnate Abilities - Exactly what it says on the tin, Incarnate Abilities are disabled in the arena, even at level 50.

Disable IOs - Need a better name for it. Basically, flipping on this option will disable set bonuses, procs, and global bonuses of certain IOs (such as the Recharge in the LoTG Defense/Global Recharge). IOs still apply their normal enhancement values. This could perhaps be split up as multiple options for individually shutting down set bonuses, procs, and/or globals.

Disable Enhancements - Exactly as it says on the tin. This would naturally include everything in the "Disable IOs" option. Probably the least likely to be used of these three for trying to set up a balanced match with your friends who are all slotted at wildly different investments, but it never hurts to have it as an option for those who are interested.

The last 25% HP went down so fast I only had time to hit Hami with the Chem and Nuke. Much faster raid than the one I joined a year and a half ago where it took three hours or some such. I need to do these more often.

On a higher level build, I'd say swap Siren's for Oppressive Gloom. Just hop into the group after RI is down and just laugh. If you can fit them in somewhere, Amplify works nicely with Soul Drain for a massive spike, especially with slotted Fallout. Works wonders with Dreadful Wail too.

And yes, Rad/Sonic is awesome.