Warkupo

This only happens to me when I hit the 'get all inf' button as well. My solution is to just not hit that button.

Without meaning to sound snarky, it's hard for me to care what they do with Jab aesthetically while it remains such a terrible power to use mechanically. I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to it getting different animations, but I still wouldn't take it.

I'm not entirely certain how the mechanics of Inner Light work, and Red Tomax isn't up for me to go look. I'm thinking it's something like 10 seconds of buffed damage, and then 20 seconds of not-so-buffed damage, but I don't know.

At any rate, you would likely need to spread out your attack chain over a thirty second period, applying buffs to each attack as you would have them, add up the total damage, and then divide by thirty to get your DPS with regards to Inner Light. The only complication I see is that your attack chain probably won't perfectly end when Inner Light does, and you'll likely need to reactivate it again during your attack chain, which may mess up DPS calculations slightly.

Probably easier to just go solo a pylon and figure out DPS that way.


Also, for R.Strike > Blast > Bolt > Repeat you just figure out the activation time of Blast and Bolt, add them together, and that number is about how quickly you need R.Strike to recharge in order to make the chain work. Anyway, with Arcanatime you need R.Strike to recharge in about 3.036 seconds. To figure out how much recharge we need we just set up an algebra equation of:

10 / x = 3.036

x is the global recharge we need (that is 100% base recharge + (global recharge + enhancement bonus))

Soooo, PEMDASing around, we get 10 / 3.036 = x, which is x = 3.293. So we need 329.3% - 100% (base recharge) = 229.3% Recharge in order to get the best chain possible (with reactive). Probably a little more to be on the safe side, what with server lag and all that.

Electric Melee / Shield

Dew Et.

I actually have bound the 'I' key on my keyboard to bring up the information of whatever I'm targeting, as I read the Bio's of *everything*. The first thing I do when joining a new team is look at the information of everybody on a team, and if they have a bio, I will take the twenty seconds to consume what information you have decided to put there. Even if it's horrible and filled with cliche's, I will read it.

So yeah, there's at least ONE person in Paragon City reading your bio's.


As for whether or not the limit should be increased, I'd rather they just fix it so that it doesn't randomly add characters, stop typing, lose text, and generally annoy the ever lasting **** out of me when I'm trying to use it. 1024 characters is a lot more when you can actually USE all of them.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Regen requires a lot of 'skill', but then that term is always loosely defined anyway. For me, Regen basically boils down to: Hit Dull Pain. Not enough? Hit something else.

Willpower is good, I probably like it more then Regen, but I also feel kind of... helpless, if things aren't going my way. Aside from inspirations and maybe Strength of Will, there isn't a lot you can do to remedy a situation with Will Power aside from running away and trying again. Regen, on the other hand, feels like it always has one extra 'god-mode' I can turn on.

Tough and Weave are hard toggles to run before IO's on pretty much any character, not just Dark Armour. Your inclination that the set gets better with IO's is not wrong, and that's pretty much what you're going to need to do to make the problem go away.

For the time being, I would focus on running your Resistance toggles, including Toughness if you can get away with it, and otherwise rely upon Dark Regeneration to sustain you in tough spots. Definitely trade Cloak of Darkness for Combat Jumping, which costs *much* less endurance and covers your immobilization resistance.

Probably turn off Death Shroud until you can cut it's endurance cost down and put some useful damage procs into it; the piddling damage it does is not really worth it otherwise *especially* considering you're using such an AOE heavy primary.

I might persuade you not to bother with Cloak of Fear or Oppressive Gloom for much of the same reason; Your AOE damage is going to be taking out minions very quickly, and I've never found much use for the toggles unless I could stack them with something else. I certainly *don't* need an entire toggle devoted entirely to stopping minions, and you probably don't either. Oppressive Gloom is the better choice if you *do* go for one of these.

Dual Pistols is actually fairly ahead of the single target DPS most 'blaster' powersets are capable of until around level 50, where other powersets are able to attain much higher ST attack chains due to having more global recharge to work with and more constant AIM/Build-Up cycles. It's AOE damage, however, stays reliably high for most of the game and is quite a bit better than a number of other powersets (not all of them; certainly not Fire).

All in All Dual Pistols is probably a 'middle of the road' set. Not terrible, not the best, but perfectly viable to play. Personally I pair it with Kinetics to take off the burden of not having Aim. It's hard to miss Aim when you have Fulcrum Shift, let me tell you.

I'll probably keep playing for as long as the game is available, but it won't be constant. I get bored and go flirt with other MMO's or video games for extended periods of time, and I usually cancel my subscription to things I don't see myself using for awhile. A lot of the time when I do this, I won't come back to whatever game I left. City of Heroes is the exception. It is one of the few MMO's that is truly, constantly innovating. Every time I come back to it I am amazed at how much new stuff there is to explore from the last time I logged on.

So, yeah, I'll probably keep coming back to City of Heroes.

mmm, I'm looking at numbers as well, and with a very quick rough estimation, it looks like it could be fairly potent. At a To-Hit Debuff value of 58.48%, you're To-Hit from most powers is going to be -8.32 for 10 seconds. While that doesn't seem like much of a boost compared to -5.25 you'd have from not slotting it at all, the difference starts to add up when you start stacking the debuff on an enemy. For instance, if you can keep up 3 applications of the to-hit debuff with an enhancement value of 58.48%, the enemy will have his to-hit reduced by -24.96, and only have a 20.04 chance to hit you. If you did that same thing with no to-hit debuff enhancements, that enemy instead has his to-hit reduced by -15.75, and has a 29.25 chance to hit you. That's a difference of 9.21, which, in terms of how to-hit and defense work, is a quite a significant difference.

If you can stack the effect 6 times, without it wearing off, the enemies to-hit will be floored. He will only have a 5% chance to hit you, and you'll effectively have some sort of reversed soft-cap Blaster.

For best results I'm thinking 2-3 Lysosome Exposure, which increase your Accuracy, To-Hit Debuff, and Defense debuff by 33.33%. After that, perhaps just straight Damage, or maybe Damage IO's if you can find a set bonus you like.

*Do* keep in mind, however, that your To-Hit is not going to be doing much of anything against an Arch Villain, and is going to be at reduced effectiveness against enemies who have additional To-Hit, such as Rikti Drones. Also be aware that, unlike a truly soft-capped blaster, you need time to build your To-Hit, which is time the enemy has to take you down. At the same time that a Soft-Capped blaster is only going to be soft-capped to a few types of defense, where as your To-Hit reduces enemies ability to hit you indiscriminate of what element or type their powers are.


You might also want to contemplate taking Oppressive Gloom and Soul Storm from the Soul Mastery tree via Ghost Widow. It doesn't have as much to do with your specific enhancement preference as it is just taking advantage of your primary and secondary. As you mentioned, you like Abyssal Gaze in that it stuns enemies.

Oppressive Gloom stuns all enemies around you at Mag 2. This will take care of any minions around you, effectively removing from the fight in a method similar to World of Confusion. It has better synergy with your Dark Blast set, however, in that if a boss within 12 feet of you, then you can use Abyssal Gaze while Oppressive Gloom is running and he will instantly be putty in your caring hands. Oppressive Gloom is normally hard to use because it lowers your HP, but Drain Psyche should mitigate that issue entirely.

Alternatively, or Perhaps even additionally, Soul Storm works very much like your Abyssal Gaze; a single target hold, but it is Mag 3 instead of Mag 2. If the idea of getting into melee combat to stun the boss is unappealing, Soul Storm can very easily be used from a range with Abyssal Gaze as a sort of 1-2 punch that completely disables the boss as well. This takes more set up time than Oppressive Gloom, and it won't take care of the minions, but you don't have to go into melee to make use out of it, and it sounds like you prefer range.

Things to think about, at any rate.

I'm not paying money for a stupid werewolf I can only use five times. Make it a permanent power and maybe.

But probably not, I still don't want a big man-dog following me around.


Make it something pretty.

Thank you for clearing it up. I can understand, and agree with, why you would adopt that methodology against a single powerful enemy who takes a prolonged period of time to defeat as it does give an apparently more realistic representation of what the Sonic blaster will be capable of doing for that kind of scenario. I apply a similar logic when I am calculating for double stacked Blinding Feint or Follow Up on my melee AT's.

Still, I don't think it's insignificant to, at very least, be aware that a Sonic Blaster has a period of time where he has to stack his -res effect on the enemy before he can achieve a damage per second which factors in a constant -res debuff. Most of the time we are not fighting a single opponent that takes several minutes to defeat, but instead many quick skirmishes against several dozen individual enemies. While you could argue that such a scenario is more relevant to a 'who has better aoe potential' type of discussion, I still think it's important that a Sonic Blaster is aware that he is going to have to rebuild his -res debuff every time he has to target a new enemy, which is going to happen frequently during most combat scenarios in the game. His calculated DPS is going to more often resemble what his 'first' attack chain returns, rather than what he is capable of against an Arch Villain.

Why not just have a bunch of super speeding heroes take turns running on a giant mousewheel? Superspeed is a cheap enough toggle that you can run it without depleting your endurance bar, and I have to think that a speed of 92.5 miles per hour would generate a lot of energy. I mean, hell, I can power up my entire house with a 30 minute ride on a bicycle hooked up to a generator and I doubt I go close to 92.5 miles per hour on that thing.


So yeah, I just solved the energy crisis.

@Obitus:

I'm not sure what factors your using to arrive at your DPS, but the way your applying the extra damage done from the -res effect looks wrong. You appear to be calculating your DPS, then adding up how much -res the enemy will have accumulated by the end of the chain, and then multiplying your dps by that accumulated -resistance.

In the game that -res is, I believe, applied after you finish executing the attack. So the first attack you use will have no -res attached to it and do it's basic damage, while the next attack you use will only be multiplied by the -resistance that is applied from the first attack, and so on. So you should have something like:

((Shriek Damage) + (Scream Damage * 1.13) + (Shriek Damage * 1.26) + (Shout Damage * 1.39)) / Total Activation Time = Damage Per Second w/-Res

The actual DPS should be significantly lower than what you are depicting.

I'm against changing Scrapper mechanics in an effort to make Stalkers better. A scrapper is sold as a soloist to the people playing it; Requiring it to be on a team to make full use of its' critical effect is going to make a lot of people, myself included, rather unhappy.

The thematic reason for allowing Stalkers higher crit chance when surrounded by allies is that the Stalker can take better advantage of combat to make more opportunistic strikes. I would not be surprised if team scaling critical hit chance was not derived from an effort to allow Stalkers to make 'back stab' attempts ala DnD's Rogue class. This overall theme of a Stalker is what should be making them different from a Scrapper in terms of combat; A Stalker is supposed to take advantage of his surroundings to do damage, while a Scrapper is supposed to be a premier combatant. To relate back to DnD terminology, it's basically the difference between a Rogue and a Warrior. While their goals in combat are the same, their methods are stylistically different.

When the first round of Stalker Changes where being applied in an effort to make Stalkers more viable in a team situation many people seemed to like the idea of diversifying Stalkers from Scrappers by allowing Stalkers to be much more critical hit oriented than Scrappers. I personally feel that this is the sort of route that should be attempted in an effort to increase the damage of a Stalker to be more competitive with Scrappers and Brutes, rather than simply increasing the damage scale to match that of Scrappers.

My own proposals are to make Assassin's Strike and Hide inherit powers of the Stalker AT, or add them as an 'extra' level 6 and level 1 option in order to restore the powers that their inclusion has replaced. This courtesy does not need to be extended to placate, as placate simply replaces taunt/challenge which has little use both mechanically and thematically for the Stalker.

Assassin's Strike needs renovating. I want to feel as though I'm actually assassinating someone when I use it, and it is hard to get this feeling when I cannot even take out most Lieutenants in one application. Currently, there are many powersets where using it is debatable, as often a Stalker will posses a powerful single target attack which can replace it by having comparable damage and being much faster to execute.

I propose either giving Assassin's Strike significantly more damage, to the point where I *can* take out a Lieutenant without having to amplify it with Build Up, or giving Assassin's Strike a chance to instantly defeat the enemy it is used upon. Personal preference is placed on the second option, assuming that such an option is possible to code on this engine. Without giving it a terrible amount of consideration, I'm thinking something like a 100% chance to instantly kill a minion, a 50% chance to kill a Lt, and a 25% chance to kill a boss. I'm iffy about permitting such devastation to occur on an Elite Boss, but Arch Villains should not have a chance to be instantly slain as these are supposed to be team oriented challenges, in which case I would simply increase the damage Assassin's Strike can do to such opponents.

Finally, I would like to see the Stalker base Critical Hit chance increased in such a way that their final damage output could theoretically match that of a Scrapper. With consideration to Stalkers still receiving increased critical hit potential on a team, I think Stalkers should have their base critical hit chance increased to 20% vs the Scrappers "10%" (minions excluded).

In a damage scale x critical hit rate formula this puts Scrappers at:

1.125 x 1.1 = 1.2375 Theoretical Damage Scale.

and Stalkers at:

1.0 x 1.2 = 1.2 Theoretical Damage Scale.

A higher critical hit chance will mean that a Stalker has the potential to do significantly more damage than a Scrapper, and given that a Stalker would still retain their team buff ability, the Stalker will be doing superior damage on average compared to a Scrapper in a team scenario, something I feel is justified given their lessened survival.

This is how you get me to watch the credits.