Warkupo

As for their size, I was able to juuust clear one with an SO slotted Super Jump, so they're at least.... 160 feet tall.

=D

As has been mentioned: Intelligent KB= Good; Stupid KB = Bad.


Using Tornado in an 8 person group with no form of -KB on the enemies is bad.

Using GALE every second it is up will result in a strongly worded letter of my disapproval.

Constantly using me to target your enemies on an energy Blaster is bad. I will literally target the worst possible thing in the spawn and just stare at it while it runs over to munch on your face if you do this to me. I will slip the tank twenty dollars not to save you.

When your stupid demon horde keeps pushing me out of the way so it can do it's piddly group focused damage. Oh, that last one isn't KB? IT MIGHT AS WELL BE! D=<


That said, I'm usually okay with a little KB. It's not a big deal for me to have to spend half a second running up to whatever I was fighting and continue stabbing it. It's when it happens over and over and over and over again and I have to spend the entire battle chasing rag-dolls around that I begin to get... slightly angry.

You'll still want to slot at least two end mods into stamina and it's ilk, but you got the right idea about making performance shift: chance for endurance a priority. Generally I 3 slot Stamina for PS: Chance for Endurance, PS: Endurance, and a normal Endurance IO. This puts you at an ED suppressed enhancement value of about 95%. PS: Endurance has the same enhancement value as a generic IO, which is why I use it. Might as well have a small bonus to my movement.

Four slotting Stamina with four Performance Shifter IO's is actually *slightly* less effective than just using PS: Chance for Endurance and 3 generic end redux IO's, at least in regards to stamina management. You might consider it for the tiny HP and movement buff, but honestly, none of the these set bonuses on the Performance Shifter set are really worth going out of your way for, especially not at the sacrifice of something else. The only time I might consider Performance Shifter IO for its' set bonuses (outside of the Chance for Endurance proc, which is wonderful) is at the 6 slots, where the AOE defense might become an option for a soft-cap build.

Dark Melee/Fire offers insane amounts of damage and very good survivability. If memory serves, I believe Dark Melee has the highest single target damage attack chain of anything available to Brutes provided you take Gloom from the Ghost Widow Patron Powerset. Fiery Embrace on top of Soul Drain are going to take your already considerable ST damage to ludicrous levels. Burn, Fiery Aura, and perhaps Dark Obliteration should help take care of your AOE needs very handidly. You'll also have a very hard time running out of stamina with Dark Consumption *and* Consume. It may actually be overkill to have both, quite honestly. You're going to do it anyway, because it's awesome.

Now, Dark Melee's biggest draw back is lack of decent AOE options, but /Fire solves a lot of that. Fire, on the other hand, still has some 'problems' to be aware of. It's a resistance based set, meaning that it suffers if you're trying to build a soft-capped character. You'd basically be starting with nothing, and while it's not impossible to soft-cap a few positions (typically smashing/lethal) from what, it's still difficult to do and usually requires a lot of defense toggles to pull off.

/Fire also suffers from a lack of KB protection, but that's pretty easy to remedy with an IO in a few of your travel powers.

/Fire also has kind of poor S/L Resistance for a Resistance based set. Fire Shield, when slotted properly, should give you about 35% S/L Resistance, and while that will make a difference in how long you survive, it's definitely a good idea to throw Toughness on top of that to get your S/L Resistance up to around 53%. Still, you need to be aware that most your mitigation is tied up in Healing Flames and your impressive damage output. More than anything, /Fire relies on killing things quickly to avoid taking hits.


On the Flip side, Fiery Melee is no slouch for DPS either, and regularly competes with Dark Melee for the top single target DPS slot. It has better more reliable AOE options as well, which could make it more ideal for a farming build, or just smashing a lot of people in the face at once. You'll still want Gloom for the highest ST attack chain available to Fiery Melee.

I also, personally, think the fire swords are cool looking.

Dark Armor is very toggle heavy, and unlike Dark/Fire, Fire/Dark does not have any AOE endurance draining options to help remedy. You'll want to intelligently plot your power choices so that you aren't trying to run a bunch of toggle before SO's. Besides that, you'll also want to make and use blue inspirations, and be sure to Frakenslot your powers with IO's as soon as it is feasible to do so. Now, I don't consider any of these things difficult to do, but some people do find them annoying, so it might impact your choice.

That aside, Dark Armor offers 'better' mitigation than Fiery Aura. While it has similar S/L values, and might want to pick up Tough, it also has resistance against every damage type in the game (including psionic) which means it will handle mixed damage, or pure elemental damage better than Fiery Aura who needs to rely on Healing Flames to deal with more exotic damage.

Dark Armor also has one of the best Heals in the game, fully capable of completely restoring your HP with only two enemies near you. With proper slotting it refreshes in about 15 seconds, and can be brought back even faster with Hasten and other global recharge from IO slotting. In short, it is *very* hard to die with this power. If you took nothing from Dark Armor except this power, you would still be incredibly hard to kill.

Finally, Dark Armor has it's choice in dealing with minions with Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear. Cloak of Fear provided a mag 2 fear effect against everything nearby you, meaning minions will cower helplessly before you. Oppressive Gloom requires more of a sacrifice from you in that it lowers your HP, but it offers more consistent damage mitigation in that it stuns enemies instead of fearing them, meaning that they can't attack back. *however* stunned enemies also like to do things like wander out of of Oppressive Glooms radius.

You only really need one of these toggles, and personally, you may find that you need neither of them. I personally do not use them, as I feel Dark Regeneration and the shield offers enough mitigation to make these two powers a redundant use of endurance.


And since I'm advocating Soul Mastery so hard, you might also look into picking up Darkest Night. It will greatly debuff enemies To-Hit (-16% when slotted) and Damage (-21%) provided the 'anchor' you cast it on isn't killed. It's a fantastically great power for both Resistance and Defense based characters. Unfortunately the To-Hit portion of the power is obliterated to almost nothing when fighting Arch-Villains, but the damage reduction will be in full effect. It makes a good power whether you pick Dark/Fire, or Fire/Dark.

Ultimately, I don't think you can go wrong either way. Personally I think Fire/Dark is a little stronger in that it offers comparable damage capabilities, but exceeds Dark/Fire in survivability.

Maybe that's where all the flying heroes live. Why would flying heroes need a ground door, after all? That makes no sense.

You usually need more than an 8 person group to get them to show up. I'm thinking two or three teams should do it. I usually only see them spawn when everyone in the zone shows up to take part in squashing some undead noggins.

I think it would be easier to just lower the minimum height limit from 4 feet to half a foot or something, rather than invent some entirely new mechanic which basically accomplishes the same goal.

I can also see a lot of potential reasons against doing it. For instance, the team defender might find it extremely annoying trying to keep track of the half-foot halfling as he darts around all over the battlefield; lost within a sea of ankles.

I just finished the First Ward arc, and I thought it was absolutely amazing. I do agree it ends kind of abruptly, but I understand why they won't just tie everything up if it's expected that they are going to continue with this storyline. I'm now curious if I can take my Preatorian character all the way to 50 without ever having to step foot in Paragon City or the Rogue Isle's.

The ambushes and NPC dialogue don't always blend well together, and I wish that the timing between one and the other was handled better. I'm a very quick reader, so I don't usually have a problem with it, but I know my step father is going to be raising a fit when he starts doing this content and is trying to read dialogue happening across the map while angry snake ladies are bearing down on him.

Now, as far as ambushes in isolation go, I really do approve. Maybe I'd sing a different tune if I wasn't a Dual Blade/Willpower Brute, but I feel like it really kept the action flowing in that it randomly spiked up the difficulty. The vanilla game, by contrast, is always completely at my control, with spawns being perfectly content with just standing around, staring at cave patterns until I decide to come turn them into exp. First Ward was fast, exciting, and not always fair. I loved that. It gave me the impression that my enemies were actually the ruthless, anger driven monsters that were being described to me.


I really liked how they continued to incorporate previous characters into my missions. One of the problems I experience with the vanilla game is that contacts come and go so quickly that they don't seem like they really matter. They are basically just a voice box to point me at my next objective, and don't typically have any lasting, defining characteristic that will help me remember them. Not *all* of them, mind you, a good handful of the missions in City of Heroes and even more in City of Villains are really well done and quite memorable. A lot of the earlier missions, however, are very uninspired, I feel.

First Ward, and Going Rogue in general, actually feels like it has a 'cast' of characters with their own personalities, plots, and relevance. I'm actually going to *remember* the characters in First Ward and the crap we went through together. There's villains who I actually have a reason to dislike beyond them just being evil, and angry, and in my mission so I have to kill them. A re-occuring cast is definitely a good thing, and something I wish the rest of the game utilized more often.

Now to completely contradict myself; I did occasionally feel like some stories were dropped prematurely. For instance, I really liked my role in the Survivor's Camp, and how I brought Palatine into power, but it felt like I just sort of abandoned everyone as soon as it was time figure out what the Apparitions where. Maybe it would have caused a sense of character overload, but I would have liked it if I had more missions where I was working with the compound and Palatine again. I kind of felt like it was going to pick up with them again when one of the crazed Seers recognized my connection to Anna (stopped in my tracks at that point), but was quickly disappointed that nothing came out of that. I even felt kind of awkward asking Noble Savage to risk his life during the PPD raid since I hadn't actually talked to him in so long.


I do kind of agree with Sam about the back story of First Ward needing fleshed out more. I feel like I got more information reading about it on Paragonwiki than I did in the actual game. I can't decide if they're being purposefully discreet about it because they plan to reveal more about it in future arcs, or if they're just leaving it less detailed for the feeling of 'mysticism'. Either way, there's a lot of loose ends floating around in the zone that I want fleshed out, and the zone is definitely done well enough that it deserve fleshing out.


Either way, I *really* liked the story and all the little gameplay elements involved with it. I daresay that it might even be my favorite series of arcs in the game, but perhaps I'm still all giddy with excitement from having just completed it. I am a little bummed that this character has to basically sit around until they finish whatever follows this story segment--I really wanted to get him involved in some of the Halloween stuff. On the bright side, at least I have plenty of time to get all the day-job badges there~

The textures on them still look really crisp. If it was a bug that they are this fantastically huge, I would have expected the textures to look all smeared looking like what typically happens when you zoom up really close to an object.

*looks around*

Controllers and Masterminds were more popular, so they put a price gate on them to make the monies.



There, I said it. Now you don't have to all awkwardly think it.

I didn't use combos on my DB until I could use Attack Vitals (lv26), and I was perfectly fine. Empower and Weaken don't do enough to justify fluxxoring around with your attack chain to pull them off. You are much better off just smashing the buttons until Attack Vitals and Sweep, which are actually worth utilizing.

The best combo takes a lot of recharge in Ablating Strike to get it working, a little over 300%. If you are going to go for this combo my best advise for you is not to sweat a fraction of a second of delay. My own build still has about 0.108 seconds of delay between SS and AB, and I promise that you will not notice it. I mostly mention this so you don't drive yourself insane sacrificing aspects of your build to get that 0.1 second.

Your general rule of thumb for endurance problem should go:

Buy, and change inspirations into blues. This is extreamely useful for levels 1-22 before you get SO's.

Have enough accuracy to hit things. Missing prolongs fights, which means you're going to be using more endurance to get through a spawn than usual. Make those hits count.

Frakenslot everything for endurance reduction. Around level 30 if I still notice my blue bar having trouble (or start having trouble) I'll just grab whatever is the cheapest IO I can find with Endurance/Something and shove it in my powers. Having all your powers using half as much endurance as before makes a *giant* difference.

Using these three tips I have a *very* hard time running out of endurance on any character at any level.

We're kind of like a giant old married couple now.

I'm kind of talking out my *** right now, since I haven't actually ~done~ any of the incarnate stuff (I just started playing again, get off my back), but the system I see work in most games is diminishing rewards for spamming the same content over and over again.

If I was a developer I'd want people playing all the things that I made, because, you know, I made them. I would think it'd make more sense for them to offer x rewards for the first time you do the mission, then x-y rewards the second time, and so on, and then it resets at the end of the week or something.

I still think you should do that ebola thing, though.

I don't really think it's worth it. With 3 slots of Taunt Duration (an enchantment value of 103.85%) you're only increasing the duration of RttC by about 1 second. That's hardly an improvement. If you're really serious about tanking on a willpower brute you'll want taunt.

The 'fix' to this bug was the ability to auto-complete a mission every 3 days.

Oddly enough, I had just made my second fish-man based character a few weeks ago. Probably not going to get the gloves and boots though; They don't look organic enough to me.

Isn't the brain in the jar with googly eyes just copy-pasted from the Clock-Work King? I would not forget those googly eyes.

Going off on a mild tangent, but I want to also express my love for Water Spout on a regen stalker. Bouncing enemies up and down while you cut them into ribbons and let your native regeneration heal all your boo-boo's is just as potent as using something like MoG of Shadow Meld. Even better, Water Spout does a pretty hefty amount of damage after you total everything up, especially if it's focused on battering a single opponent.

Outside of that Regen Stalker is still good, I think, it's just annoying that Dull Pain isn't doing as much for me because of the very low HP cap stalkers have to deal with.