Warkupo

I very much think Hide and Assassin's Strike should be inherent. Stalkers constantly lose out on good powers because of these two things that are really the foundation for what makes a stalker a stalker. Placate and Build-Up are fine, although I really wish not *every* set had to have build up. It would be nice to have some variation to provide different styles of gameplay.

I typically prefer brutes over scrappers as well. Comparable damage most of the time, and then better everything else.

Out of curiosity, does this game start with the letter 'v' and involve spinning around at enemies while dual wielding spears until they die?

The very irritating thing about that game is that it originally began with an emphasis on combat and story, and proclaimed to avoid all that *other* unnecessary garbage such as fetch quests, inventory management, and farming for that 0.05% drop rate item. It's only very recently that it's switching over to a more item obsessed model in an effort to keep players playing and paying money. A lot of people, like myself, quit playing because of it.

It's actually the last game I played before I came *back* to City of Heroes.

I'd rather they just increase the HP cap.

While we're on the subject, is there any way to have the Caption Box *only* appear in the middle of my screen? I hate that it floats off to the side, underneath where I have a lot of my UI placed. If it was in the middle I could more easily read it *while* I'm fighting, too.

The i21 update is supposed to have some additional Incarnate powers which might help your problem, Werner. Specifically:

Agility Boost: This alpha tree focuses on boosting Endurance Modification, and secondarily boosts Defense and Recharge rate. The radial branch also boosts run speed, fly speed, and jump distance.


source: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=275742.

Assuming that it follows the style of the other Alpha abilities, that's 45% increase to Endurance Modification, and 33% increase to Defense and Recharge Rates while ignoring up to 2/3 of Enhancement Diversification.

I haven't actually done any math with it (I'm not entirely sure how the formula is applied, really) but I'm assuming it will help push you ever so slightly closer to the defense cap.

I'd go with either Time or Storm, as each are pretty powerful sets. Storm is fun for reasons you probably already understand. It's a lot of chaos and destruction that results in a very solid control mechanism which just so happens to put out a lot of damage. There's something fun about having all your pets, lightning storms, and Tornado's munching the enemies into dust.

Time is pretty good on masterminds, I would think. I compare it too a more aggressive version of Empathy. You have some heals and some team buffs, but you also have a lot of potent enemy debuffs and control moves. The end result is a very capable mastermind who can both keep his team alive while simultaneously deteriorating the opposition.

As for wanting to be more active with Demon Summoning, it's actually not a terrible waste of time to take your whip attacks as they all lower the enemies resistance which would allow your demons to more quickly dispatch opposition. The duration of the -res effect is kind of low, however.

EDIT: Quickly crunching some numbers, I think an attack chain of Crack Whip - Corruption - Lash - Corruption - (Repeat) at about 200% recharge would work pretty well. You'd be able to sustain 3 stacks of -res procs assuming you do nothing but attack for a total resistance debuff of about 28.14%, which is 28.14% *more* damage all your pets would be doing against a single opponent if you have them group up on one target. Could be useful for quickly taking down a boss, or something. Only problem is that you can't really sustain that much recharge as you level up. I can't think of a sustainable attack chain for only 95% recharge, which is what you'd more realistically have on the way to 50. I *suppose* you could just spam all your attacks whenever they're up, but you'll still have gaps in your attack chain, which you probably will need to buff and stuff anyway, and you'd likely only be able to sustain one or two -res procs, which will still help, but it's obviously not as good as three.

Make a tab for NPC Chatter and Caption text. It helps immensely.

And then maybe listen to Sam about fixing the thing.

I just hover'd over them with either Hover or a Jetpack. No big deal really, but I guess I'm glad for the change~

I don't actually know if it's possible to have a powerset feature animations that can switch between having a weapon animation and not having one. I know that the developers are capable of offering alternative animations, but I get the suspicion that weapon sets require more work.

Still, if they can do it, I don't see much reason why they couldn't offer alternative staff animations. It isn't as though there are a lot of variable animations for 'shooting people with energy', and the magical staff animations already largely exist within the Carnival of Light. I would think it would be a simple matter of just figuring out which animations to replace with which staff attack.

Of course, I'm just guessing. Maybe it's the most difficult thing to do in the entire world; I don't really know.

All of that said, I'd bet they are going to simply make a magic wand type powerset, rather than offer alternate animations for damn near everything.

It's cheap and boring, but the thing I usually do is just type /vis_scale 0 if I'm having lag problems. What this command does is greatly lower the 'draw distance', which means that things only load fully when you're closer to them. This alone will usually speed up my game significantly. To get it back to normal just type /vis_scale 1. If you want *greater* draw distance than the default, type /vis_scale 2.

Mm, I may have answered your question too quickly. Let me elaborate a bit:

When Dull Pain ends your HP is scaled back down to whatever it was before, in this case 100. Your current HP, in this case 20, is also scaled down to match whatever your current maximum HP is.

20 is roughly 14% of 140. 14% of 100 is... well, 14. So if you have 20 HP, and Dull Pain ends, your current HP will be set to 14 HP. So, while what I said about you not being able to *die* from Dull Pain expiring is true, I don't want to give the impression that you don't still have some repercussion from it fading.

Your maximum HP just drops from 140 back down to 100. You don't die. Although that would be hilarious.

Thematically? The enemy should be *dead* after an Assassin' Strike. That would also probably be unbalanced, but it bothers me slightly every time I *don't* kill somebody with my super stealthy 1-hit KO move. Which is pretty much always.

A long, long, long time ago I remember hearing some developer discuss the idea of having enemies hang out in more 'logical' locations. That is, you wouldn't have Hellions hanging around the parking lot around the Atlas statue, where eighty-hundred percent of the heroes are having a costume contest. Instead you'd have to go to dark alleys and abandoned areas to find your enemies.

The problem with that, according to the developer, was that players couldn't *find* enemies to fight. While it sacrificed realism, it was ultimately more enjoyable that enemies weren't difficult to find, and that's probably why we have them on every street corner.


As an aside, I like how Preatoria handled it's utopia with the invention of passive 'enemies'. Obviously that doesn't work in Paragon City where you wouldn't encounter any enemy who didn't also want to kill you, and you certainly wouldn't be attacking 'innocent' people such as police officers and the like. In Preatoria though, it really helped make the city feel 'sane' while still giving me targets to beat up if I decided I wanted to be a jerk right then.

I do and don't like this idea. Mostly, the animation doesn't support hitting more than one enemy, and Assassin's Strike is supposed to be a very personal attack. Numerically it would help, obviously, but thematically it feels wrong.

And we know how important THEME is when talking about a Stalker~

I agree with everything in this thread. A clean slate would help AE out immensely, and might actually revitalize my desire to go play around in there. It's such a mess right now that I won't even bother.

You might want to make a seperate tab devoted entirely to NPC chatter. That's what I do, and it makes keeping up with the story a lot easier.

There's always paragonwiki too, I guess. That's how I *used* to figure out what was going on in a Task Force while I wasn't the leader =D

My understanding is that momentum is activated for five seconds after you use an attack that doesn't have momentum. Having momentum changes the animation on your attacks to something that is far faster than when you attack without momentum. That's how it is explained in the Beta Forum, at any rate.

Given that, I still think regen is a poor choice, despite having efficient endurance usage. Your DPS will suffer more than usual whenever you have to use a click-power because you'll lose whatever momentum you had, and it's very unlikely you can always afford to only use click powers when your momentum is down considering how *often* you have to use click powers on that set. Personally I think Willpower will be the strongest secondary for TW given its' hands-free nature and endurance efficiency. Electric Armor is an attractive option as well, I just feel like Power Sink comes so late that you can't really plan around having it when you'd really like it.

There are also two attacks that won't work until you have momentum, but that might be changed so that they just gain extra benefit for having momentum so as to allow players more freedom in how they play. It's also being discussed having build up grant momentum. I believe it's endurance use per power is also being challenged.

Hero: Defeat some great evil and give a rousing speech which rallies the common man back to your cause, while empowering everyone that they have the power to change the world.

Vigilante: Shrug/Make up some emo speech about the greater good, and continue to put people into that Asylum they keep breaking out of.

Rogue: Divert the blame the media is pressing on you to the greater super hero population at large, and then use this situation to sell technology that will aide in the capture of said heroes. Also you stole that technology.

Villain: Prove the media right by DESTROYING ALL WHO OPPOSE YOU.


New Scenario: Your rent is due and you don't have the money to pay.

By calculation, I got BF - AS - SS - AS performing slightly better. It's a difference of about 5 DPS, though.

I'm not sure how BF - SS - AS is supposed to work. SS and AS together take 2.4s with Arcanatime to fully execute. You'd need BF to almost be at the recharge cap in order to run that chain without interruption.

You'll be attacking so quickly with either chain that -res procs can almost be assumed constant. They aren't a tie-breaker either way. Personally I say stick with BF - AS - SS - AS. It's hard enough to get the recharge for that string; BF - SS - AS just seems impossible, and it's not any better.