seebs

Huh, someone had told me that the gun drone was like FFG, where trying to summon a new one dispels the old one. I haven't got quite enough recharge to see -- I would have about two seconds to complete the animation. Maybe in a couple more set bonuses.

Good thought about having the gun drone take the alpha, I hadn't thought of that.

Interesting. For purples, it's clearly better to do LotGs in general -- you can sell 10 LotGs or celerity stealth procs, and be pretty sure of enough money to buy any one purple recipe. But if the high-end PvP IOs are worth enough more than that... Yeah.

FWIW, I'd be willing to broker deals and not take a cut, I don't care. Since I'm "that seebs", it's not as though I can just disappear.

Just about everything was pretty rough up through 20. 3 of your 12 power picks were forced (4 counting the secondary set, though the T1 in your secondary is usually okay). Worse, this is the point where you tend to have gaping holes in your power sets. If you're a melee sort, you almost certainly have a pretty bad attack chain, or holes in your defenses, or both. And of course, there's also travel powers, especially for people without the long-term vet rewards. So if you wanted a travel power, and stamina, those two things took up five of your twelve power picks.

The only sets that didn't feel "tight" to me were the ones that didn't need stamina.

In That Other Game, I had a warlock who was genuinely evil. Also, hilarious and cute. Gnome warlock. Talked constantly about torturing things, ripping souls from still-living bodies, and wanting a pony. Was done partially as a parody, partially to demonstrate that a character who was funny and friendly could still be substantially creepier than people who talk about being evil as such. Which is really creepier; someone who says he's evil, or someone who says "Writhe more, Defias Enchanter! It makes Timi's toes curl up!" while draining a soul?

I think the thing is... Evil doesn't have to be completely generic malevolence. You don't have to hate everyone, or want to hurt everyone, to be properly evil. You can just want to hurt some people. You can have friends. Look at the real world evils; many of them are married, apparently happily. To someone else who may well be evil.

CoH "villain" is sort of a ridiculous parody. Think the bad guys in the old Captain Planet show, who were running a business in order to pollute, not polluting as a side-effect of cutting corners while running a business. They are often malicious for the sake of being malicious, rather than because of any particular dislike for specific people. Rather than seeing people they hate, and acting to hurt those people, they feel a desire to hurt, so they go looking for people they wouldn't mind hurting. It's... sorta silly.

You can make a character who is truly evil, but that character may well look more like a CoH rogue. To make a villain, pick people you want to hurt, and will be willing to spend money to hurt, instead of focusing on personal advancement. Or, look for power rather than wealth.

Sometimes, the most helpful thing someone can tell you is that you don't know what you're doing, and that this is your problem. Your problem is not that the game makes it too hard to get enough endurance, it's that your mental model of how the different enhancements interact to produce combat results is wrong. Until you fix that, you'll find the game much harder than it needs to be.

This has nothing to do with nice or mean, or being a "dick". It's just the information that is necessary in order for you to progress towards never running out of endurance except when there's sappers around.

DP/dev. I don't know anything about the epic power pools. Thematically, munitions would be the obvious candidate. I don't know how good or bad any of the powers are. Body Armor is lower resistance than the others, but doesn't cost endurance; not sure whether I care. The hold might be nice, since it'd stack with suppressive fire. Surveillance looks excellent thematically, LRM rocket looks pretty fun too.

(Please don't move this to Player Guides yet. This is a draft, for which I'm seeking feedback. I'll post a finished guide in Player Guides when it's done.)

Left to your own /devices: A guide to the Devices secondary

It was the best of sets, it was the worst of sets. The /devices set has long been regarded as the weakest of the blaster secondaries, and that's because it is. However, "weakest" doesn't necessarily mean "weak"; the set is viable, playable, and even (for some people) fun. This guide gives an overview of the set, some notes about how to use it, some historical review of why the set is the way it is, and some notes for people coming from a traps set, or considering giving up on devices in favor of traps.

I'm starting, not with the review of the powers, but with the FAQ. The powers are only interesting if you like the feel of the set; if you don't like how the set feels, it doesn't matter what the statistics are.

Who should play /devices?

If you are looking for the best set for steamrolling content, look elsewhere. The /devices set's strengths are all about setup and preparation. If you're steamrolling content, the set is marginal, and you generally won't use it. You don't get a "Build Up" power. You don't get hard-hitting melee attacks. Your immobilize doesn't do damage.

If you're soloing, /devices can be an amazing set. It's not always fast, but there is something wonderful about watching a x8 spawn melt away without getting to make a single attack against you. No, I'm not exaggerating. Now, it'll take a few minutes to set up, and it won't work every time, but you can do that.

If you want to play a Natural origin blaster with a secondary that makes sense, /devices is your only choice. All of the others would require some kind of amazing technology, magic, mutation, or whatnot; only /devices is built around things that are at least conceivably within the realm of non-superhero technology. If you want to play a superspy, half blaster and half stalker, you might like /devices.

Here is what I do for a typical spawn, when soloing. I find the spawn. I find a nearby corner. I spend a couple of minutes laying down a field of trip mines between the spawn and the corner. I smoke grenade them. I set up a time bomb in the spawn. I walk around the corner. If any of them actually survive (usually they don't), I might have to actually use one of my primary powers. Otherwise, I have just killed them all without them even being able to target me once. I move on.

If that sounds fun, you might want to play a /devices blaster. If that sounds tedious and unfun, you probably ought to look at other sets.

Why is /devices weak?

The /devices set has never really been updated to fit the modern CoH game. Before ED and IOs, Targeting Drone meant that you could put one more damage enhancement, and one less accuracy, in most powers. That translated into a substantial damage increase -- figure about 10-15% compared to a blaster who had to slot for more accuracy. Now, most people will have damage at the ED cap, and with set bonuses, they may well have plenty of accuracy without even explicitly slotting for it. Targeting Drone went from a pretty decent power to a sort of mediocre power. It's still better than nothing, but it's not at all obvious that it's better than a pool power, or better than not using it and saving your endurance.

Similarly, Cloaking Device was a really nice stealth, back when there were no Stealth IOs. Now, it's not great. It's not awful, and it helps that it stacks with Stealth IOs, but it's a mediocre to pitiful amount of defense (especially since only part of it is available when you're in combat), and stealth is not in and of itself all that useful most of the time.

The big central flaw, though, becomes clear when you look at time bomb and trip mines. The powers that ought to be among the set's star players are utterly useless once combat starts; they are essentially impractical to use except by setting up before combat. On a fast team, the average spawn will be dead in the time it takes you to set up a time bomb, rendering the power completely pointless.

Quite simply, /devices was not built for CoH the way it is actually played.

How does /devices compare to traps/ or /traps?

The traps/ defender set is widely regarded as an amazing set. The reason is clear if you look at a few of the powers that traps/ has and /devices doesn't. Look at Triage Beacon, Acid Mortar, Force Field Generator, Poison Gas Trap, and Seeker Drones. Do you know what they have in common? They aren't interruptible. You can use them in combat. And that means that you can actually get substantial utility from them. Furthermore, with the better defense of FFG, a traps/ defender can toe bomb with a reasonable hope of success even after a fight has started; a /devices blaster has to build very, very, carefully to get enough defense to be able to use any powers in combat.

Defenders get less mileage from Trip Mines and Time Bomb than blasters; for blasters, at least it does enough damage to be potentially worth the hassle. For defenders, it does very little damage. (Corruptors, however, might consider it as a situational power.) Masterminds replace Time Bomb with Detonator, but Trip Mines is pretty useful everywhere.

If you really want to use the /devices powers actively in combat, on teams, consider going with a traps/ defender, or /traps corruptor, instead.

Why would anyone play /devices, then?

Because this game is not fundamentally about efficiency of builds. It's about building a character that looks cool to you. It's about awesome super heroes doing amazing things and being stunning. If you have never seen a /devices blaster wiping out a spawn with mines, it's hard to appreciate just how awesome it looks; the ragdoll physics in CoH really shines on handling large numbers of enemies hitting mines with decent knockback.

I play /devices because I love the way it plays, and don't care that it's inefficient. I sit around watching TV while I set up nests of trip mines. I wander through missions arranging to one-shot the one and only enemy on the map I need to kill, without bothering to kill everyone else. Sure, I get less loot and XP and inf. But my superspy stealth infiltrator is playing like a superspy stealth infiltrator, not like a muscle-bound idiot. So I'm happy.

So about those powers.

I'm not gonna lean too hard on what powers you should or shouldn't take. With I19, blasters are no longer paying the three-pick "fitness" tax, and it's now quite possible that it's reasonable for you to take everything in your primary and secondary without feeling like you're missing out too much.

Web Grenade

You have to take it. This is not as bad as it sounds. Immobilize, shimmobilize. What matters is that this power gives a solid -recharge penalty. Oh, and a -fly. But the -recharge is what really makes this sorta useful. Feel free to spam this on really tough targets, even targets you can't actually immobilize with it.

Slotting: Accuracy, immobilize, endredux. Recharge is already decent.

Caltrops

If you're like me, you read the description, thought about how little "minor" damage sounded like, and looked for something else. I'm gonna ask you to do something crazy. Read the "Detailed Info" of this power before you make that decision.

Did you notice the words "magnitude 50.00" in there? I bet you did. Yes, this power has a magnitude 50 fear effect. Enemies will run away from caltrops. You know what enemies do while they're running? They don't attack. Not only will enemies run to the edge of caltrops; if they prefer melee, and they've tried a couple of times to get to you, they will sometimes run away to the far end of the map trying to find a path to you that does not go through caltrops.

Oh, and while they're running away? They're doing it with an 80% or so slow. Anything that isn't slow-resistant will be running away from you in slow motion.

Put caltrops on a corner, stand around the side, and take pot shots at the people who occasionally slow up. Drop caltrops under your feet and just stand there shooting. It's all good. Effective use of caltrops makes /devices a much, much, better set than it would be otherwise.

Slotting: A little recharge is all you really need. Damage is pretty trivial (though it can add up on a large group), but consider a damage proc, such as the Impeded Swiftness chance for smashing damage. It'll only fire every 10 seconds, but it fires right away when you drop the caltrops.

Taser

It's a stun. Magnitude 3, meaning lieutenants but not bosses. Whether you want this or not is largely a function of whether your primary has a stun. My main /devices character is a dual pistols blaster, and while the primary has a stun, the stun is converted to a hold when using special ammo, meaning no stacking without a lot of toggle management. Not especially rewarding. Still, it's a stun that you can use to keep a lieutenant locked down if you slot it for stun duration and recharge. Not awful, but probably skippable.

Slotting: acc/stun/rech, mostly.

Targeting Drone

The to-hit bonus isn't awful. If you're not clear on the difference between to-hit and accuracy, the answer is that to-hit is multiplied by accuracy. If you have a 10% to-hit bonus, and a power with 1.6 total accuracy, your chance-to-hit is 16% higher with that power, not 10% higher. This also gives resistance to to-hit debuffs and a perception bonus. Overall, I like it; worth taking.

Slotting: Consider a Gaussian's set for it; note that the set bonus may be more important than the actual effect on your to-hit.

The chance-for-build-up proc is debated in here. It's a 5% chance to fire, for 5 seconds, every 10 seconds. What that means is that you get about 2.5% extra damage from it, which is pretty minor. On the other hand, you don't have a real "Build Up" power in your secondary, so it's perhaps better than nothing. The down side is the lack of control; some people would rather put the proc in Aim in their primary, so even though they'll get fewer fires of the proc, they're more likely to be at useful times. (Not all primaries have Aim, mind you; if you're a dual pistols blaster, your only option would be here.)

Smoke Grenade

A very nice power. The -tohit penalty isn't huge, but it's significant; comparable to a minor to-hit debuff power in some of the debuff sets. The -perception penalty is very nice. If two spawns are close together, this lets you kill one without the other noticing. If you have cloaking device, but no stealth IO (or vice versa), this gives enough -perception to make you effectively invisible to the victims. Even without them, you may be able to sneak by some groups.

Slotting: I slot for a bit of recharge and a bit of to-hit debuff. Might be an okay set mule, if you find a to-hit debuff set you dearly love.

Cloaking Device

Not awful, not awesome. Cloaking Device compares favorably to the Concealment pool Stealth power, because it has no movement penalty, but the movement penalty isn't that significant. The defense bonus is fairly trivial. Strengths are that this power takes defense sets, and that it stacks with stealth IOs. With this on, and a stealth IO active, you are effectively invisible except to things like Rikti drones, snipers, etcetera. (And remember that Smoke Grenade can help some with those.)

You can replace this with other powers, but they're not necessarily better; it's just that CD isn't that much better than the other powers. It's not a great power for a secondary set, but if you want stealth, it's still probably better than the other ways of getting it.

Slotting: Defense sets! If you didn't take combat jumping or hover, put your kismet +accuracy here. (Or don't bother; you may not need it since you have targeting drone.) Or just put in a defense/endurance, or straight endredux.

Trip Mines

One of the real shining points of the set. Trip mines are slow to set up, but the damage is impressive. Mines last until something triggers them (by coming near them) or about four minutes, and you can set them up in 25 seconds unenhanced. (About five seconds of activation for the power, 20 seconds recharge.) Enhance for recharge, accuracy, and damage. Endurance really doesn't matter; even with incredible recharge, you're still looking at around 12-15 seconds per mine, so if you have at least 1 endurance per second recovery, you cannot run out of blue placing these.

One of the reasons this power is liked despite the slow setup is the option of toe-bombing: Run into a spawn and plant a mine; it goes off essentially immediately, doing decent damage to everything nearby, plus knockback. Once a fight has started, though, you have to be careful; the power is interruptible, and as a blaster, you probably don't have awesome defenses. You can also drop a trip mine at your feet before you start blasting. If you pick up aggro from something, and it runs up to you... boom.

Trip mines will not go off if you are too far away from them when something runs over them; I don't know the exact distance, but it seems to be around 60-80 feet, which is to say, blast range. The blast is delayed a bit from triggering. The down side is that if you have a string of these, a single minion can trigger three or four before taking damage from them. Some creatures will actually get out of range before the mine triggers, taking no damage. For best results, stack them at corners and wait around the corner.

To get good results from trip mines, you need to have a bit of setup time, and you need to know where creatures will be going. A tank who wants to work with you on this can do a great job of moving things over mines. Usually, this isn't worth the effort on a team, but if you end up in a bit over your heads, the option of doing a ton of extra damage is really worth it.

Slotting: Obliteration is a great set for trip mines; lots of recharge, not much worry about -endurance. Global recharge is also your friend.

Time Bomb

The great thing about Time Bomb is that, when you make level 35 on your /devices blaster, you can pick literally ANY pool power.

Okay, it's not quite that bad. But it's pretty bad. The issue is that Time Bomb goes off at a fixed time. Your other powers let you set up a kill zone which will screw up your enemies when they come to you. If you try to use Time Bomb that way, you will spend a lot of time being disappointed.

If you do not get a stealth IO and a stealth power, don't bother with Time Bomb. It's useless to you. If, however, you took them, give it a second look. With invisibility, you can walk into a spawn, use Time Bomb, and walk away. You now have 15 seconds to get... wherever. Say, on the other end of a field of trip mines.

What Time Bomb offers you, with invisibility or comparable stealth, is the ability to open a fight with an attack against which the enemy cannot retaliate. If you shoot an enemy, everything in the spawn that has line of sight to you can shoot you. Every attack power you have is vulnerable to this... except Time Bomb. Which goes off at a time when you've walked around a corner.

The damage isn't much higher than trip mines, but Time Bomb has more knockback, and a significantly larger radius (20' instead of 12'). Most of the time, this will hit an entire spawn if you place it in the center of the spawn.

Slotting: Again, Obliteration.

Gun Drone

This power is... sorta mediocre. Not awful, not great. The good news is: It does damage, it can take aggro off you. The bad news is a fairly long recharge, an excessive activation time, and a ludicrous endurance cost. A couple of slots of some recharge-intensive pets set, plus some global recharge, and you can keep this out pretty much all the time. You can't stack them, so don't bother trying.

This used to be a stationary turret, and that was worse; making it mobile means it can stay with you for its entire minute and thirty seconds, making it useful for two or three spawns. Again, not so useful on teams (where the activation time is a killer), but it can be a life saver solo, where it's extra damage and some potential aggro mitigation.

Slotting: Pick up some recharge intensive pet stuff, probably. Don't bother with the defense/resistance procs, you aren't really pet specialized, and the gun drone doesn't pick up that much aggro.

So, Primaries

The /devices set can be useful with any primary. Thematically, it goes especially well with archery, assault rifle, and dual pistols. Here, you will find the one benefit of the pre-combat setup aspect of /devices: Less redraw in combat. Most of your /devices use was done before the first shot was fired. If your primary has a stun, that will give synergy with Taser, allowing you to keep a typical boss locked down.

The dual pistols set has no aim. This is, well, annoying. A dp/dev blaster has no good options for boosting primary damage output.

Assault rifle, unique among blast sets, gets a damage bonus to its snipe from targeting drone. No one has any idea why that applies only to AR.

Energy's knockback can be much more useful coupled with your ability to set up trip mines and defenses; you can knock people into mines, or back over caltrops. Lots of potential there.

Fundamentally, though, if you pick /devices, it is your primary; it is the set which defines how you play, and your "primary" is going to be used in ways consistent with /devices, or you're going to hate your character. The other secondaries tend to be used to support your blast set and maybe give you a bit of flavor. They have comparable basic functionality; some sort of immobilize, some melee attacks. None of them will encourage you to spend five minutes setting up for a fight. None of them allow you to wipe out an entire spawn without using a single attack from your primary.

MFing warshade.

rad/rad corruptor or defender.

nrg/nrg blaster.

km/wp tanker.

I would think that reducing the interrupt time a fair bit on both would make them better.

The other thing that might make them better would be giving cloaking device better stealth, so you didn't need IOs to be able to toe-bomb effectively with it. That would make both powers noticably more useful.

Time bomb is actually quite nice soloing -- drop a couple of trip mines, drop a time bomb, walk around a corner, and /em walllean. Spawn dies. It ain't fast, but the risk/reward is pretty good.

The accuracy nerf to purple drops are costing too much endurance in AE, which has completely wrecked PvP. Furthermore, now that no one plays tankers anymore because brutes can go to blue side, flippers have made it impossible to buy any recipes useful to stalkers, who can't go on TFs because they have too much single target damage. Unfortunately, because AE babies don't know how to access the new content without a server merge, CoH is doomed to buy Going Rogue, and badgers are spamming Atlas Park with questions about how to get to the ferry. The new Ultra Mode graphics are preventing people with Storm Summoning from getting on teams which is a problem because knockback is the best mitigation other than intangibility, unless you are fighting enemies with redraw.

p.s.: Also, the forums have no sense of humor.

More effort towards frankenslotting and set bonuses will help a lot to make up for that -- many powers are pretty decent with four good IOs.

I've been fine thus far. Sure, slots are a bit tight, but I think they're supposed to be, by design. I don't think they're any worse than they used to be, really. Sure, I can't add as many slots to a hypothetical new power as I had on average in my old powers... But overall, I'm enough better off that I don't mind. I think the intent is that we specialize some; I can't just six-slot everything.

WTF. This makes less sense the more you talk.

I've been playing a bit over four months and I have somewhere around two and a half billion inf, and my highest level character just made 40 ten minutes ago.

Weird, I guess that changed a while back, it's been PBAoE for as long as I've been looking.

This does fit with a similar problem I had, where /traps on my MM, caltrops took TAoE, but Mids said it would take PBAoE.

Energy and /dev will both have redraw issues for you. If you really want archery without redraw, archery/TA is okay for a corruptor or defender. (As a friend comments: Trick Arrow is the worst buff/debuff set. That doesn't mean it's a bad set, but it is the worst.) The combination works, and no redraw issues.

If you do /devices, you will have redraw, but for the most part you'll be using your secondary before combat and then sticking with the primary during combat. Usually.

For the record:

Time bomb, with invisibility-level stealth, is actually pretty cool. I don't think it's an amazing power, it's certainly not as awesome as trip mines, but... It's pretty nice, and in the post-I19 world, the power list isn't as congested as it used to be.

It's not one of the best secondaries, and indeed, it's sorta gimped post-ED, because what it was good at became meaningless, but...

If you want varied play style, /dev might be worth looking at. I solo stuff slowly and methodically without getting hit. On teams, I tend to toe-bomb and jump into the middle of fights where I can spam attacks, pick off healers, and otherwise do whatever looks most helpful, but I have a lot of options for disrupting enemy groups in ways that other secondaries can't so much.

... But if you like that, do give some thought to the traps set, whether on corruptor or defender (or mastermind). Because traps is sort of like devices, only a lot more useful.

Don't have one in mids yet, but...

If you want to take full advantage of /dev, with some cost in functionality on a typical steamrolling team, consider cloaking device, a stealth IO (I did unbounded leap in sprint), and time bomb+trip mines. It's slow, but you would be AMAZED at what you can kill without getting significantly hurt, even without noticeable defense.

Still working on mine, just made 37. Having a blast. There is something beautiful about watching x4 to x5 spawns disintegrating without even getting to fire a single shot at me.

Ah-HAH! That would explain it.

Time Bomb is definitely not an attack. The stealth dropping before re-applying would make sense, though. As would bane spiders having just a bit more perception.

Stealth is: Cloaking Device, Stealth IO in Sprint, total of 65 feet.

I have been having a lot of fun mining things. 8-10 trip mines and a time bomb. Whee! For extra fun, I also tend to toss smoke grenades.

Every so often, when I go to set up my time bomb, something starts shooting me, whereupon my stealth suppresses to 15 feet and everything else starts attacking. No snipers in site, no drones, just ordinary Longbow or Arachnos.

Are there things I should be aware of that need more than 65' of stealth to stand next to? Does stealth occasionally drop for a millisecond or something? Any suggestions?

I'm soloing, so it's not other people.

Was thinking about this a bit. You know what else I'd sorta like? A secondary palette that could hold a small number of color pairs, and you could just click on a color pair in the palette to set the current costume piece to match it.

Usually, I've been told that the mastermind primary attacks are pretty skippable -- not that they're worthless, just that you've nearly always got something better you could do. But people also tell me that the whip attacks in DS/ are more useful.

So. I'm looking at a respec. Should I pick up one or more of the whip attacks? If so, which one(s)? I'm planning to take everything from /dark but black hole, and currently I have TP foe, teleport, hover, provoke, tactics, and maneuvers. I'm pretty attached to teleport as my travel power, and to provoke for keeping my little babies safe, the rest is more negotiable.