uberschveinen

You're acting like they had a high cap and brought it down. That's not the case. We had crappy HP and they brought them up. Asking for a buff or a fix because of a buff is like getting angry that you only found fifty bucks on the street when your friend found a hundred.

As it is, Regen is a top-tier set. It used to be better than most. Now that it got buffed a little less than the others, it's merely arguably the best. It's fair.

Rage is stupid to autofire. Its drawback is such that you need to keep it controlled. Hasten is not neccesary to autofire. You will see when it needs to be reapplied. Active Defense going down will easily mean your death. It gets auto.

The nukes are meant for teams. By yourself they are a good buff, a good debuff, and a good AoE damage attack. That's bugger-all for an hour's work and under no circumstances should you tolerate such antics. Once you start playing with teams, you start seeing results. A whole team rendered hard to kill and with a fat damage buff is huge. The rare all-boss spawns go down well when nuked. But where you truly start to see shenanigans are when they stack. Archvillains and Heroes at the end of very hard SFs and TFs are no match for a properly-prepared team, and nor are the buff abd debuff caps. Imagine, if you will, eight Bionukes, followed by eight Chemical Burns, followed by eight Nuclear Blasts. That is a 1200% Damage buff, a 6400% regen buff, -400% resistance, -280% defense, -240% endurance, -800% recovery, and around 4800 damage before buffs and debuffs. For some teams this is unacceptably slow, and they will instead summon and Biological Mutagen eight Shivan Decimators.

If this concept fills you with a sense of almost religious terror, do not be alarmed. It proves only that you are still sane.

One nuke on one man is crap. One nuke on eight men is devastation. Eight nukes on eight men is such incalculable power as words fail to describe it. No sooner do you see a foe than they fall as though the Hand of God simply reached down and turned them off.

Damnit, I've got a pre-deployment exercise all next week. "Soon (TM)" had better be secret code for "Right now (TM)".

It sounds interesting, but I can only imagine it'd be very complicated.

There are always going to be people who just don't get that ERP is one of those 'fight club rules' things.

Sands is the stronger power, but neither is that good. I always go with the Axe because it's much cooler, and actually hs some use in its narrow niche.

The sets all do feel different.

Other people can talk relative potency much better than me, so I won't. Any set and set combo can work solo in this game, so don't worry about it.

Super Strength is a very solid set. It feels huge, until it stops, and it stops a lot. If not hitting things constantly irks you, don't play SS. If you like feeling like a destructive force, it's great. It's also a stronger set if that matters.

Claws is really good. Fast powerful attacks. It doesn't have the brutality of SS, but it feels much quicker. It's extremely damaging, but very heavy on the endurance, so keep that in mind for the secondary. If you hate having to stop for endurance breaks, you'll need a very specific build.

Dark is a more 'tactical' Brute set. It isn't as outright damaging as most, but it has a lot of useful tricks in it, like craploads of -ToHit, a heal, +end, and a really really nice +dmg +ToHit. If you've got an active secondary it'll be hard to manage both, but it's a great match for a passive set.

Dual Blades is... not the best. It's got decent single target, better AoE, but others are better at each. It's a lot of fun to watch for a while, but it tends to grate on you, because it neccesitates pretty specific attack chains and no variation. Three of the four combos are good, and Vital Strike is fantastic. It's a set to play for concept or fun, not efficiency.

Electric Melee is a great AoE set, but pretty light on active damage protection compared to anything else. Low-power sleeps are dodgy. If you pair it with a good damage secondary, it's a powerhouse. Single target suffers.

Energy is good. Those who say it sucks outright are pretty much wrong. It's not as strong as it was, but it used to be preposterously good. It's very single-target, and good against fewer foes, because of stacking stuns. It's not much good at all for AoE.

Fiery Melee is damage, damage, and more damage. It's fantastic at AoE and pretty good at single target. It destroys the end bar, so you need a good recovery secondary for it. You also need a survivable secondary because it has no damage mitigation except for killing the enemy first. It feels really good to play at the later levels, and a bit slow early on.

Stone Melee is the SMASHiest of the sets. It feels slow, but massive. It's very good at single target and AoE, depending on how you build it. It's also got good mitigation, although you want to avoid knockback. You pretty much need a stamina-boosting secondary for this because it's absolutely voracious.

War Mace is not as huge as Stone Melee in feeling, but it still feels very powerful. IT's quite good at single target and does small-group AoE very well. It's got a whole mess of mitigation, too. It's not too end-heavy, either. It's a pretty good all-round choice. If you're looking for help with a build be careful, because it got enormously buffed a while back.

Axe used to be an okay powerset, just a bit better than War Mace, until War Mace got huge. It's not as nice to play as most other sets. It's still playable, but the only real reason to go with it right now is because you want to hit things with an axe, which is a very respectable reason.

Which secondary you play is actually wuite important, because they feel ver ydifferent. The right combos just flow fantastically.

Dark Armour is very strong, but pretty damned bad at low-levels. It's furiously end-hungry before you get Stamina. It's got decent resistances and fantastic Psi protection. It's also got some strong control powers in it, and a good damage aura. The REAL reason you want it is because of Dark Regeneration, which is pretty much heal-to-full every thirty seconds BEFORE slotting. This all makes it a very 'tactical' set, and quite active. It goes well with simpler primaries, especially end-light ones. If you want an apocalyptic death machine that sucks endurance like water, Fiery Melee is your man. Pity it has a Tier 9 resurrect.


Electric armour is a very passive set, and damned tough in resistance. It's great for endurance, with a cost reduction AND an energy drainer. It's pretty passive, so even better for active sets. Your knockback protection is tricky, though. Recently a small heal was added to it, saving the need for Aid Self. It's also got a good damage aura, making it a natural choice for end-heavy primaries. I can't give much advice on how to combo it, though I suspect Fiery or Electric would be good choices, or anythign that stands to gain from the recharge boost. Be careful with the Tier 9, it's potentially worse than not using it.

Energy Aura isn't very good. It used to be interesting for being the only pure defense set, until Super Reflexes said hi. There's a good bit wrong with it, not the least that the SFX really grate, too much to go into here. It's not much good except for concept builds.

Fiery Aura is very active and very, very angry. It's a resist set that's not that tough and has mez holes in it, but it has one of the best heals in the game really early. You mostly want it for the damage aura, end-drainer power, and the fat damage boost it has, which works twice as well for Fire damage. It also has a Tier 9 resurrect ,which is a letdown. Go Fire, or maybe Elec, and make a damage-dealing king. Dark is the way if you want to make it a bit more survivable.

Invulnerability used to be a little worse but got buffed recently. It's a good survivability set because it has high resistances, some defense, and a massive but slow heal and HP booster. It does nothing for endurance, and the Tier 9 is not nice. It's very passive, so good for active primaries. It's extremely resistant to the most common damage in the game, and has decent defensesbut anything Psi will eat your face. It's not better or worse for any particular powerset, but I like it with the weapon sets.

Shield Defense is absolutely fantastico for an offensive build. Unlike the Tank version it's damned hard to make it super-tough, so I don't worry about that. Instead, I look at the supreme carnage you get with a damage buff that gets bigger for every enemy in range, and an AoE attack that I would swap any two primary powers in any set for. It's a bit active, and not helpful for endurance, so not much good for some sets, and you need some mitigation to live. Its Tier 9 is damned helpful. Even though it's not that much resistance, it's got a solid HP boost and, very luckily, a fat recovery boost. It's the premier secondary for an AoE build. This thing plus Super Strength is the most fun I've ever had with any character in-game. You're basically an unstoppable force of nature with two damage buffs and two huge AoEs who by all rights should be dead but survives because the enemy has to live longer than three seconds to kill you. It's not SMASH, it's what SMASH wants to be when it grows up. Just remember, in teams you have to play like a Scrapper, not a Tanker. SMASH!

Stone Armour is preposterously tough. You can have vast resistances AND defense AND a huge HP boost al at once. The problem is it's a damned slow thing. You're almost immobile unless you take teleport and use it to move in combat. You're also very end-heavy and a late starter. It's very awkward to play unless you build it just right, so you really need to seek advice from the veteran Stoners. Also, it's end-heavy, so as tempting as it is to combine with Stone Melee, only do it if you don't mind needing a full tray of blues for the rest of your life. It's the Tanker's Brute.

Super Reflexes is supremely hard to kill, since it has massive positional defenses and really high resistance to defense debuff. It also gains slight damage resistance as you lose health, to give you time to pop a green. It has no heal ,which is a nuisance low-level, and is a late starter. The biggest weakness is that it just doesn't feel right for many Brute concepts. It's an easy set to use and end-light, so goes well with active primaries. It's damned good with Claws.

And finally, Willpower. It's a strong standby set for any primary, with a light mix of defensive options. It takes a bit of work to make it really tough, but once you do, it's TOUGH. It also has a massive boost to recovery and the best regen power outside Regen. It's a very passive set, so good for active primaries, and despite the lack of damage aura, still good for AoE primaries. It works with everything, but it's best with Stone, because it compensates the horrendous endurance costs.

The most important part about playing a Brute is that there are som many different flavours of SMASH. Find the one you like, and keep rolling until you do. When you find it you'll be bewildered at just how fast the thing levels up, because the game will fly past you're having that much fun.

And one last thing: your costume is more important than anyone will admit on the forum. A costume you really like will make even the crappiest build fun to play, and make fun Brutes awesome.

It's just a nuisance to have lost the mission after working damned hard and getting incredibly close to finishing it. In retrospect, I'd've liked being able to drop the mission for the complete, but that wasn't an option. It's just the brilliantly evil timing of the boot.

Ulrich the Immortal: "And you, Kronos Titan, the supposed savior of the Malta Group, are now its sole survivor. And, along with them, you've given me yourself. Calmly, coolly, entirely without incident."

Dev Team: "No."

Global Chat: "ATTENTION: In five minutes our servers will be shut off for routine maintenance. Please note: while we reserve this two-hour period for maintenance updates, they will not necessarily require the entire two hours. Additional updates may be scheduled outside this time-period as needed. We may also perform maintenance on additional related servers, such as the web servers, message boards, or login servers."

Dev Team: "Not without incident."

Popup: "YOU HAVE BEEN KICKED FROM THE SERVER"

Originally they were anti-tank rifles, like the Boys anti-tank rifle and the Mauser Tank-gewehr. They were something you could give to troops to penetrate the armour back in world war one, when it was only really resistant to standard caliber weapons. While they weren't much good, they meant that soldiers could actually fight tanks instead of just running away.

Then, tanks got better. Materials science improved and they got more heavily armoured. There was no longer a way to make effective man-fired anti-tank rifles, but a whole stack of these rifles in use. So, they did what the army always does for things it's too invested in to actually toss out, and foudn a new job for them.

Anti-materiel (with an 'e' and a squiggle on top, it's French) rifles are meant to destroy vehicles and equipment less armoured than a main battle tank. These are generally transport or infrastructure items, collectively referred to as materiel, hence the name. They're useful because they can break things from much further away than a block of comp B and FBT. You use them to puncture the engine blocks of very light vehicles, the cabin or the wheel-well of proper military vehicles, and the vulnerable points of armoured vehicles less resilient than tanks. You can employ them to break fixed defenses in rare occasions. In modern warfare, they're absolutely fantastico for counter-IED work, because you can blow them in place from a few hundred metres instead of a few hundred millimetres, on the rare occasion you can afford to blow in place.

The games don't portray them well, because games need to be more fun than accurate.

EOD RIFLE TECH - THE GAME

SPEND A WEEK DOING NOTHING ON BASE
GET CALLED OUT TO A SUSPECTED IED
LOOK AT A LUMP OF TURNED EARTH THROUGH BINOCULARS WHILE FIFTY ARMED MEN IN CONVOY MAKE STUPID JOKES
SHOOT EARTH ANYWAY
BURROWING RABBIT GOES "WHAT THE CRAP WAS THAT?"
TOP SCORE

I'm over it now. It was more annoying at the time because I was within about two minutes thirty seconds of getting the damned thing done. I'll just have to redo it in Ouroboros and do it right.

I'm more annoyed by that damned Steven Sheridan arc I've got that I can't actually finish and takes up three scrolldowns of room in my clues tab.

So I've been doing the Crimson arcs, which are fantastic, and in the last hour worked my way through the World Wide Red arc, enjoying it so much I even built an impromptu team to take out the GM Kronos Titan. I beat the second last mission and took out Director 17, and get an autostart timed defeat all with an Elite Boss. Not a problem, says I, since I've beaten more faster and Elite Bosses have never been a problem for me.

Suddenly, Scheduled Maintenance. Half an hour.

That made things a bit more urgent. Still, Tankers perform best under pressure. I clear out all of the stationary mobs on the map, but too slow, because while I was doing that the ten and five minute warnings came up. I press on regardless, determined to finish it by any means neccesary, only to get punted a few seconds into stabbing the absolute crap out of the big robot's foot.

This is irritating, mostly because I've never managed to get myself into this situation before and have no idea what will happen. Either it will time out during maintenance, and I'm already failed, or it'll start again after maintenance, in which case I'm going to fail anyway, just later. Is there anything I can do about it? I assume the answer is "no and it's your own damned fault."

The only real challenge in the lowbies seemed to be the EB/AV at the end. I can easily kill any Elite Boss and a handful of the low-regen AVs with my Tanker using only character powers now, but I expect losing half my powers would be an obstacle. Being able to tank the GM Kronos Titan and never go below 90% is one thing, doing that malefactored to 20 is another.

I'm low on the DPS, but I suppose a Shivan will provide that. Hell, there's not really much in the game you can't compensate for with a Shivan and BioChem nukes. I'll see what I can do without temps, because build-only is much more fun.

I'd probably do better on my Brute. SS/SD is a raging force of apocalyptic fury almost beatiful in its horror.

Actually, one thing I noticed a while back when tryign this Redside was that it's not always the AV that's the ******* bit. My DB/WP Brute munched all three of the Heroes in the villain-only Ouroboros Strike Force, but it took me four goes to kill that ******* +6 Mu Guardian Elite Boss.

Title, really. I know there's a few Redside I can do, and some I haven't tried yet, but I'm interested in seeing who's been able to do these. I've got two toons I finally got to fifty, a WP/DB Tanker and a SS/SD Brute, and I want to see what they can do without wasting hours to get to an unkillaboss.

Actually, a clarification. Who's been able to solo Task Forces without an outrageous build? Sure, a few invention sets on a fifty is fine, but your purpled-out killbot is probably a bit much. You can probably do anything in the game once you've dropped three billion inf into a character's build.

As long as it's going to happen eventually, that's good enough for me.

Dark Melee has its advantages. It has a heal, which you don't, and accuracy debuffs, which help you live.

The anti-materiel rifles don't count, because they're of no practical use now. Talking about practical use ever is difficutl because technology for payloads has really gone places in the last few decades because fo advances in material sciences.

Incidentally, those rifles could only be fired while prone and after digging in the bipod legs, basically, making yourself an impromptu platform.

Also, the thing about water buffalo and worse, hippos, is that they're generally obvious about what's going on and are happy enough to leave you alone if you stay away from the water.

You forget something. Blueside has really crappy experience/inf bonuses for arc complete. That's one thing that really struck me as I've been doing the unnaturally long blueside missions. Sure, the Hero's Hero arc is long as hell and gives 35 merits, but apparently it's only worth 165000 bonus XP at level 48. Over on red, arcs with hal;f the missions get the full 235000 at level 48.

I still think it's ridiculous. There's no feasible practical use for that sort of round. If you're going to be ridiculous you might as well be properly ridiculous and just take a Karl Gustav and refuse the warhead for soft targets.

It's not the first mission, though. It's the last mission in the arc I can't do. That's why it's a nuisance.

Oh, that explains it. It was a real letdown the first time I fired a GLA, until it blew up.

Speaking of the nitro express, the first time I heard of it I was so intrigued by what the hell they had been thinking when they made it I spent a few hours trying to figure out if there was anything in the world that you could ever need that powerful a round for. Other than guaranteeing a kill on a rampaging bull elephant shot through a baobab tree, there's really not that much use to it.

A good while back I was doing the Steven Sheridan The Organ Grinders arc, and managed to outlevel it just before the last mission. Now, a good long while later, I meant to go back and do it because it's annoying to have three clues and a huge summary taking up space in my clue tab, especially when I'm doing a fair few arcs at once. The problem is, I can't take the last mission in that arc.

I've never seen this before. As far as I thought, you'd be able to take missions from the arc you started no matter how far you outleveled the contact, and until now it's been true.

What can I do about this? I can't drop it since I don't have it ,and I can't even get a lowbie to do the mission wit hme in it to autocomplete it. Am I stuck with a massively full clues tab?

It's the same over on Brutes, or at least my SS/SD. Despite nearly every other attack involving him beating someone about the face with a giant slab of rock, the heroside KoB animation doesn't play. This is, of course, an unprecedented disaster. I don't want some weedy spinpunch, I want him to grab a slab of rock in both hands and ram it into some guy's face.