seebs

There's a specific reason I endorse this:

Twilight Grasp.

It really, really, sucks if your heals can miss. And especially if there is NOTHING you can do to prevent it from happening.

Weirder and weirder. It briefly went away -- I was on the fourth mission of an AE arc, and suddenly chatting was okay. Then it came back. Still never seen it outside of instance content.

I appreciate the offer, but I think I'll give it at least a brief try at fighting my way up the old-fashioned way. Probably. I may suddenly change my mind and take you up on that later if I hit a rough patch. :P

Yeah, I'm not hugely worried about other peoples' opinion of my choice of primary/secondary, but I would like to know how to play them competently, and I was having a hard time getting my head around the non-heal defenders. Now I think I get it, and I may well start levelling a traps/something def. I don't really totally get it, but I do know that I absolutely LOVE /devices on blasters. (I have energy/devices and archery/devices, and love both. I'm aware that the synergies aren't incredible, but SO MUCH FUN anyway.)

I can't even establish convincingly that the planet exists, let alone that it existed in the past. However, I can argue reasonably persuasively that I have found explanatory and predictive power in a series of assumptions as a result of which I can accept, at least provisionally, a series of methodologies and ways of interpreting sensory experience that allow us to draw more definite conclusions about the planet's age, and that at the very least, it appears that using these methodologies leads to more pleasant experiences than disregarding them does.

(Someone is supposed to say "I bet you're a blast at parties", to which I respond with a single-sentence post using vaguely Germanic word orderings, which has to be broken into two parts to get around the forum software's length limits, the upshot of which is "people love a philosopher, or at least, will pretend to if the philosopher sticks dollar bills in their thongs.")

Ah-hah! That makes a lot of sense.

It does lead me to wonder why stealth IOs are so highly valued, though. (Actually, a related question; if I get a stealth IO, how does that interact with exemplaring down? Shadow Fall's defensive effects are relatively minor, the stealth is the major benefit of it so far as I can tell.)

I've seen a fair number of cases where people found team teleport or similar powers handy -- gathering people together, getting a corpse out of a mob so someone could be rezzed or awakened without going back to hospital, etcetera -- but many of them were pretty avoidable circumstances, because they were cases where the circumstance arose through carelessness or inattention. Of course, calling carelessness and inattention "avoidable" makes significant assumptions about the general player base.

As to where the candy is: I was doing AE missions, and I found that I got more XP per time period by stealthing to specific targets when a mission allowed this, but not all missions do, and obviously I get a lot less loot that way -- and that may be a significant disadvantage. I think a lot of my instincts are off. Also, of course, I was doing this on solo maps, where the mission completion bonus and/or arc completion bonus are much larger with respect to the XP for enemies; if I swapped things around so that I was fighting 3x-4x as many enemies, I might well find that completely reversed.

So at this point, it looks like I'm within a couple of tweaks of a truly lovely spec, so I should probably start figuring out whether to try to get a respec trial group together or just pay the tenbux. Probably the trial group. (Although, depending on how long it takes, it may be more cost effective to pay the tenbux and spend the same amount of time doing consulting work.)

I suspect, though, that you have a much better idea of which items are worth more or less than I do, which would affect the time it takes a lot. Every time I want to look at anything, I have to look up all of its components separately, and if they move fast, I have no way of telling whether I'm looking at current prices 10x the long-term average market value or 1/10 the long-term average market value.

Hmm. If I were going to move DN earlier, though, what would I bump later? That build's pretty tight on power choices prior to 28-30.

Thanks for the information about Swift, I didn't realize that. I think I may stick with my basic model, then, of having +flight/-end in hover.

Hover's weird, it's sorta marginal in combat, except I keep finding it to be awesome one way or another -- someone will run up a flight of stairs and start fighting above me, and I can just hop up and start debuffing, I can stay out of range of the melee guy who comes after me so instead of knocking me back and doing 60 points, he shoots at me for 10, and so on. The +defense bonus is pretty marginal (although it ends up being pretty noticeable when I have everything else up), but the manuverability is joy. When I can't hover, I spend a lot more time getting stuck on intervening terrain or creatures.

I'd mostly been thinking that it might be worth putting a set into Tar Patch to get set bonuses, but that may not be a good use of slots.

I'm really liking SPTrashcan's proposed build. Here's the big mystery to me... I am really liking the notion of getting Recall Friend, because with a stealth IO and Shadow Fall, I can basically go anywhere in most missions, and then summon people. (The relevant vet reward is a LONG way out.) I'm pretty sure I'd have to give up something to get it, though. So here's the question: How crucial is Hasten? How much shorter would recharges on Fearsome Stare and Tar Patch be if I had it?

I'm also getting semi-conflicting advice about Petrifying Gaze, because I think Darkity's guide to Dark/Dark sort of deprecates it, but I am not sure either way. I think the biggest surprises for me were putting HT and DN off so far, but on reflection, I guess that makes some sense -- the stun/rez is a pretty good power, but it's moderately situational, and rarely makes or breaks something, and the content where I'm most likely to care about it is mostly 25+ anyway, so I'd have it available. Similarly, DN matters a lot more on higher-level content, where you're more likely to see things that last long enough for it to matter.

Also, a newbie question strikes: What specifically are the usual requirements of "slot it as an attack"? Once I've got Tactics, I'm assuming a single accuracy enhancement (or a couple something/accuracy) should be plenty, yes?

My casual reading hasn't turned up a reason for which a flight speed on Swift would do less than a flight speed elsewhere; is that because it actually modifies only the speed modification, rather than the underlying flight speed, or something? I could easily have missed such a distinction, and that would indeed explain it.

One other comment; while Dark Consumption requires being in melee range, usually if I'm grouped I spend a fair amount of my time essentially in melee range, hovering over the tanker or close to it, because that lets me heal the group. This becomes less significant as the other defenses and debuffs start dominating, but I still find it awfully handy to be near the group in case people start taking damage. I'm not sure, though, whether DC's concept of "melee range" would extend to "hovering right over the tanker".

Finally, last but not least:

Is there a way to make Shadow Fall less graphically intensive? In a full group, it's pretty intense, and if I'm hovering behind the group, my footcloud tends to clutter peoples' cameras.

I'm just stuck on 1280x1024 -- I don't think there's ever been a MacBook at that resolution. I think they've all been widescreens.

Oh, cool. Crafting badges seem like they'd be worth looking into, then.

That does look quite nice. It doesn't give me recall friend, but that's the only thing I can think of that I'm pretty sure I want that's not in it. I might be a bit concerned about HT coming in so late, because it's such an awesome power, but well, there's an awful lot of awesome powers to be had.

The historical reason for which I've put flight speed in Swift is that it affects both fly and hover, although I've now reached the point in my current setup where hover is, if anything, too fast -- I can run into stuff because I move too fast. So I could certainly rethink that.

I've tended to keep Hover and Shadow Fall slotted for -endurance just so I can keep them on without worrying too much.

I will stare carefully at this one, it has a lot of appeal. With my current slotting, there's enough -recharge in fearsome stare and tar patch that I don't necessarily need hasten to keep them up -- rather, I don't for soloing, in groups I still end up with a given batch of critters being dead before tar patch has fully recharged. Presumably it will get easier as I level, because three higher-level recharge IOs would get Tar Patch up faster, though if I start slotting it with more complicated stuff, that could change.

Pretty sure I don't -- and I certainly don't have EVERY key bound to take screenshots, nor can I imagine that I have a keybinding which only applies in instances.

BTW, supergroup base counts as "an instance".

Keyboard does have in theory a macro system, but I'm not using it -- and again, it's exactly one lag per keystroke, for absolutely every key I can find that has any effect while in the chat window, but not for any of those keys when chat doesn't have focus. Or when I'm in the overworld.

Possibly relevant: Also at the same time, noticed a quirk, which is that hitting return does not take focus away from chat window on my Linux system, even though it did on my Mac. Other people have told me that this is a known quirk, but at least one friend playing on Linux doesn't encounter it...

This is so weird that anyone who had it would have noticed, I figure.

Running on Linux. Crossover Games 9.0, nVidia chipset, Ubunto 10.04.

Symptom:

When I am in an instance (mission map), when I am typing into the chat window, I get about a 3-frame lag every time I hit a key.

I get no lag at all when I am not in an instance.
I get no lag at all when I have the chat window focused but I am not typing.
I get no lag at all when I am hitting keys but the chat window isn't focused.

What am I doing wrong? How can this BE?

And perhaps it is worth pointing out:

Any good programmer will tell you that there is art to code, as well as functionality. Even without any reference to the actual output, without any maps, without any zones, code can be beautiful and art in its own right.

It's like any other work in language. You can write in English, but not all writing in English is art. You can write in C, but not all writing in C is art.

I'm assuming it doesn't have to be 21 consecutive days of one particular day job without logging out in any of the others.

Also. Idle question. Does it count only time when you're logged out, or is time when you're logged in but just sitting there count?

I've been doing the newbie player altoholic thing. Whenever I make a toon, people ask what primary/secondary I picked, and then tell me that it's solid, and fairly often say that people with that build and good enhancements can solo AVs/GMs.

So, I guess that's beginner's luck. I guess that leads to the question:

Are there any primary/secondary combos that are just plain not particularly viable for some reason? Or any primary/secondary power sets that just suck for a given archetype? I'm curious about this, because I think I'd pick up more about game mechanics from looking at what doesn't work than what does, simply because so far as I can tell, nearly everything works.

This has happened to me enough that I'm wondering whether I'm doing something wrong. I have an energy/ninjitsu stalker. If I am stealthed, and I run up to something, stop moving, then hit AS, I immediately see the message saying it was interrupted, followed by about the first second of the animation. I haven't been engaged, I'm still hidden, and if I just cast it again it works... but I lost the endurance it cost the first time, and that's actually sorta significant.

Am I doing it wrong?

Hmm. What I guess I get stumped on is, how do I keep other people from running low on health if I'm traps? Caltrops certainly does help (on an archery/devices blaster, I was able to avert a near-death by causing the five things beating on the tank to simultaneously all run away in different directions when the tank had about 2% health left), but I don't see much in the way of mechanisms to keep other players from dying. Now, acid mortar is seriously awesome in terms of making critters die faster, but I'm not sure that's enough to soften the blow of the tank having inbound attacks from 8-10 critters. Force field presumably helps, but... I guess I'm assuming that the build is focused a bit less on damage mitigation, and more on other kinds of buffs/debuffs? So it's not really a replacement for a damage-mitigation build, but might be more useful in circumstances where you don't really need damage mitigation.

... Come to think of it, though, sewer runs are indeed the main place I've been doing a ton of healing. Running around with a tank on my d/d defender, I only occasionally heal, and it's not that I need to or someone dies, just that it saves time resting between mobs.