uberschveinen

I've only ever done properly with Ninja Blade/Regen. Regeneration is an interesting set, and it can at times be very tough, but it's extremely vulnerable. That's where Ninja Blade comes in. Divine Avalanche, with three defense slots. With standard one-recharge you can easily double-stack it without trying as part of a short chain. Single, it's a little extra survivability, but doubled, it's the softcap. That extra defense is crucial since it gives you some breathing room to use your regen powers, and when you already have shenanigans like Dull Pain plus Instant Healing it lets you stand up to Elite Bosses.

The thing about these sorts of rounds is that they need to be a certain size before it is plausible to carry a payload. .50 is the smallest round you can get where adding a payload will not be strictly worse, and even then the round not particularly more effective. The largest round of any practical use to a human firer isn't capable of proper payloads.

The solutions are simple. Either mount it on a platform, or deal with the recoil.

Grenade launchers follow the latter path in part. They greatly increase the size of the round to 40mm, big enough for a really nice payload, and then reduce the proportion of propellant to mass. They don't follow the same ballistic flightpath as bullets, which in this case is advantageous because you can arc the rounds to shoot over cover. They're still size-restricted because past 40mm the absolute minimum force to project the round needs more propellant than the recoil can take.

Also, interesting note; grenade launcher are actually really quiet. The Thumper, the one used in Vietnam, is so quiet the only noise you hear is the mechanisms operating. Why? I have no idea.

Recoilless rifles are where the big fun stuff happens. With no recoil you can have rounds as big as you like. The problem is recoil is what pushes the round forward. If instead of a rifle it pushes back against air it has to push back a whole lot harder and a whole lot longer. This is why these weapons have to be self-propelled instead of cartridge-propelled. The Karl Gustav, my arch-nemesis, fires an 86mm projectile. Shooting a wad of boom that big require a whole hell of a lot of boom at the other end. So much boom, in fact, that the backblast is a thing of terrifying power. Forget the pretty lines of movies. If you fire this in a room you will kill everyone in the room. If you fire this with your back to a wall you will splatter yourself and anybody immediately nearby. The firing range for these is a one hundred metre cleared zone behind the shooter's mound, and that's just the will-probably-die zone. It's not a nice neat line either, or a tight cone. The backblast from these bastards is one hundred and eighty degrees of pain. The firer feels nothing, no recoil, and they're in the calm zone of the backblast. The loader, though, might not be. If you don't get as much of your body into the firer's dead zone as you can, you will hurt. I've seen guys fall over screaming because they were a step away from the firer sideways. Like my instructor said, firing a Karl Gustav is the only time it's okay to hug another man.

I usually like it. Except on my Thermal who used to need Shivans to kill bosses.

That's the amazing thing about the Minimi; it's so good at hurting people it doesn't even need to have rounds or even a barrel to give you a terrible day.

The best part about it is that if you don't lock the barrel in properly before you dry-fire it the entire barrel will fly two or three metres away with a resounding SPANNNGGG. It's so unnaturally fitting for something so stupid I can't help but wonder if it was built that way.

Also, the first time people learn to fit the spring back in the butt. The sheer number of springs that were improperly locked and thus went flying backwards into the user was inspiring.

And then the bit where they told us that if you fial to fire and there's a round in the chamber them slam it shut, hands on face, and turn away because it'll probably explode. The funny thing is, they do.

It depends on what you are and what you're doing.

On my current project, a WP/DB Tank, Fighting is a cornerstone power. It shoves my standard S/L resistance all the way up to 70%, and pushes my elemental defenses to the softcap. Before I got and slotted Fighting, I was tough, but not tanker tough. Now I've got no less than three defensive abilities, each of which blocks the holes of the others, and all for the net impact of zero on my normal endurance usage.

On a previous project, a Corruptor, it was worthless. The resistance was nowhere near worth the high endurance cost, and the defense was neglible. Worse, it meant I coudl only attack half as often before running out of power.

Think about how much it'll help, then do it or don't.

It's not quite as bad as making a blank-fire barrel change on a Minimi and grabbing the actual barrel to lift if off. I'll leave it to your imaginations as to what happens, with a hint; after two hundred rounds through one of these the paint on the end turns black and starts smoking, and you don't swap barrels until at least 600.

No, that's what you're saying. I think it's pretty obvious what I'm saying up there.

They're not super-invincible. So? They're not meant to be, conceptually or balance-wise.

Banes aren't Stalkers. Stalkers are the flashy cartoon-ninja; the guy who jumps out of nowhere and then fights everything to a standstill without being hit, then disappears into the darkness.

Banes are the shock trooper, the saboteur. They're tough, but not drastically so, because they don't need to be. Their power comes from being able to unleash such furious devastation that the enemy is kept completely off-balance and can't do much about it. So long as they keep up the momentum, they are death incarnate. But if they slow, if they allow themselves to become bogged down, they can be isolated and eliminated with ease.

Changing this would be bad. Right now, it's a unique style of play, and also happens to reasonably closely match the Bane Spider NPCs in fighting style. What could you change it to that wouldn't make it derivative of another AT?

I haven't started a maths fight since I left university.

You're both arguing based on different premises. Some insist that you count inherent inaccuracy as part of your defense. Dechs believes that it should no. This debate has no useful outcome if you're both using different assumptions to form your premises.

The fundamental basis of any character you design is what they want, and what they are willing to do to get it. This is especially true for this sort of game, as it can define all the entire spectrum of good and evil. Design a character from here and you will automatically have someone who feels like a person and not a vague ideal.

Once you know your end and your means, you can work on why he does these things. Why does this person want to achieve that? Why is he willing to go to these lengths to achieve the goal, and why will he not go further? You don't need to get fancy here until later, but a base understanding of these will make the character be more interesting.

When your end, means, and motive are done, you can work on the mechanisms. What can he do, what can't he do? This is a part of the character you will always be tempted to do first, but it must be done last. If you do it first and work from there, the character will always feel like a plot device, because that is what it will inherently be. If you do this last even when the character actually is a plot device it will be easy to conceal that.

And now you've done end, means, motive, and mechanisms, you can do the minuitae. These are all the details of little importance to the fundamental basis of the character, such as dress, bearing, speech, habits, and so on ad infiniteum. Incidentally, these are also an excellent way to spot a relatively unskilled character designer as they will inevitably assign these grossly disproportionate attention and disregard things that actually make the character what they are.

Now, an example. One of my characters, Lord of the Red Fist.

This man wants to force humanity at large to strive for self-improvement instead of stagnating in helpless dependency on exceptional individuals, and intends to do this by removing from the picture any individual whose remarkable achievements are not simply the result of hard work and dedication.

He will do whatever is neccesary to achieve this end. While he would prefer not to kill those who only seek to help, if that is what it takes to force them to stop, then it will be done without hesitation. He will also constantly challenge forces made of individuals striving as collectives to improve the world, such as Longbow, but doesn't intentionally cripple or kill them, as he aims to make them stronger. He is not willing to compromise the security of humanity as a whole to do so, and will use his exceptional powers to destroy any threat that is genuinely beyond the abilities of conventional man to resolve, believing that so long as he cannot be relied upon to help mankind they cannot be dependent on him. He doesn't care for the fate of small people; they must prove their worth by fighting for themselves.

This, needless to say, makes him a villain in the CoH/CoV divide.

He does this because he has seen the remarkable dependency that modern individuals show on heroes, to the point that even in a city notorious for violence they will make no effort to preserve themselves, instead depending on heroic intervention. The agencies made of normal men, even as national and private armies, are almost mere support organisations for the heroes who do the real work. Compared to times past, when men fought men for their own destiny, the modern people are weak. They must be made strong again.

His abilities are extroardinary resilience thanks to an origin in fighting mythic creatures in Chinese history for so long he eventually took on their traits, both physical and mental. He is also an extremely skilled but utterly unsubtle brawler due to having spent the best part of human civilisation fighting for his life. This fitted the Super Strength and Shield Defense powersets, and the Brute archetype. Shield Defense posed the problem of where a shield came from until I saw the rock option, and the idea of the guy strapping a rock to his arm and beating enemies senseless with it fitted the brawling style.

The minuitae include the costume, chosen to look like a figure of early Chinese myth, and the manner of his speech, rough, crude, but with a core of wisdom unwillingly planted by having been alive for a ridiculously long time, and a whole lot more stuff of even less interest.

This is a method I find is extremely effective at making a character that feels liek a character, and is also helpful in refining the core concept, which iscrucial to make a hero or villain actually fun to play. It isn't perfect for this game, given I originally made the system for creating characters for stories short and long, but has worked well for me.

I think the problem is that most people don't want to have to work their character, and either want it done for them or nothing to be done at all. On both sides all it takes is the smallest bit of imagination to make anything fit your concept.

I've played a bucketload of Brutes to the high levels. Of those, some have been better than others.

By far my most enjoyable Brute is Lord of the Red Fist, my SS/Shield. Half of that is because I love the character concept and the powersets fit it perfectly, but the other half is that this build is also damned good fun to play. The sheer slaughterous destruction they can unleash is the sort of savage beauty seen in a catastrophic bushfire or a multiple-train derailment. There's no subtlety involved. Between Fury, Rage and Against All Odds there are so many damage buffs it's just silly. The combination of Shield Bash and Foot Stomp is like the total solar alignment that would tear Earth apart, except you get to do it every second fight. There is just something unspeakably awesome about charging through +3 enemies until you've got the entire aggro cap chasing you, then turning around, shattering their ranks with a Shield Bash, and then killing every last one with a Foot Stomp. They even work defensively, with the stupendous knockdown potential of SS compensating well for the relative suck of Shield's defenses on a Brute, especially if you take a detour into Air Superiority.

Now I don't know how powerful this build really is. I hate invention set fetishism, and will use them only so far as I get the inf to through normal play. My build is probably comically inefficient. But I have never played any other character that made me feel so truly powerful. From the first time you get a few attacks and realise that nearly every one you have is animated such that you are [/i] smashing people in the face with a shield[/i] to the moment you first use SB-FS it is a visceral experience. This character was so much fun that it overtook seven others in their 30s-40s on the way to 50.

The only niggling weakness with this character is that I can't use the two-handed smash KoB with the shield out. It would be so appropriate to the most damaging power I have to smash some poor chump in the face as hard as I can with a giant slab of rock, but apparently, no dice. This would be so good it's the top of my own list of animation fix priorities.

Mathematically, yes. Enormously yes.The way Defense works in this game means that it starts off almost utterly useless, but becomes exponentially more valuable with each extra point.

Look at it this way. If you have 40% defense, you've got a ten per cent chance of being hit by any given attack from a standard foe. If you have 45% defense, you've got a 5% chance of the same. That last 5% defense halved your chance of being hit, making it as good as the entire first 25% of defense you got.

What this means is simple. If you can't build up large defense numbers, you're better of not building up any numbers, and going instead for resistance. While the +3% defense from that IO is fantastic for, say, a Brute if it hits him the softcap, for a Blaster with no defense it is trivial.

Now in your case, the question is simple. Will the extra survivability offered by this bonus be worth the time invested to get that extra .5%? Do you die often enough to justify it?

If you're playing, say, a teaming Tank, then every little bit of hard-to-kill is worth it, no matter what it is. If you're a solo Blaster, then extra survivability is mostly irrelevant since if it lives long enough to make a difference something's already wrong.

Everyone needs to do something like this. I got my first toon to fifty first soloing about 95% of the time, and he was an Energy/Thermal Corruptor. I still remember my childlike glee when, having finally earning the Patron pet, I could actually beat a boss in a mission without getting a Shivan. Every time I get crappy with trying to get a character to a milestone these days I just remember the bad old days and everything seems perfect again. If anything, you can level up too fast in the new game.

SS/Shield is a very strong damage Brute, and I like it since it doesn't work like the traditional damage builds. It has an unhealthy potential for damage buffs, and two fantastic AoE attacks. It's probably the best AoE brute, simply because I've never had another character who actually rewarded me for gathering up ten or twelve enemies in one space by letting me drop all of them in two attacks. Between Rage and AAO, Shield Bash is just over-the-top. With decent Fury, it does nuke levels of damage.

Ninja Blade's novelty is that it is uneccesarily hard to kill. If you have a +DEF secondary, you'll be capped all the time. If you don't, you'll be capped much of the time. It's what makes my NB/Reg Stalker effectively unkillable by anything that can't override his mez defenses or has no -rech. It also has high magnitude knockdown, to keep bosses down as often as not, or more with a high-recharge build. It is also reasonably damaging, and very damaging if you can use Golden Dragonfly just right.

Dual Blades can do more damage. It's awkward to use, though, and unfortunately, feels it. It also has little to offer in the way of utility unless you build it for knockdown.

You seem to have confused legitimate criticism with IT SUCKS AND YOU SUCK FOR MAKING IT.

I most definetly had the option for dropping a Pither mission when I did it. This was shortly after dropping came about, when it was seven days between drops.

Now if only you could drop Mako's idiotically hard mission where there are four psi damage elite bosses, one psi damage elite boss who summons four bosses, and one just plain outrageous damage elite boss.

You can find them in the RWZ, and even better, they're usually in the areas very close to the base at levels 35-40, making them easy to take out for high-level heroes.

Only if that's the extent of your imagination. So what if you're a hero? There's an incredibly dangerous and tterly hostile alien armada rampaging across your city, rather bent on killing everybody and everything. If you still can't justify killing them, that's your own fault and not the developers.

You're given the tools, what you do with them is your problem.

I've been on three failing TFs, one on test, where the final mission was failed not because the players were inadequately skilled, but because they simply didn't have the capacity to kill Romulus or any Nictus. They weren't bad builds either.

I actually meant getting the mission, and when it becomes clear you can't win it, Calling Pither and using the drop mission option to autocomplete. That's what I was going to do some time ago, and the option to drop mission was there, but as it turned out I finished them all anyway.

Last time I got the badge you could drop the missions if you got into trouble. Is this still the case?

I think the arcs are great once they start coming together. It really solves the whole 'well I'm just some pawn of Arachnos' problem you normally get early on, by making it very clear that you're your own guy. You basically walk up and punch fate in the head until it cries and does what you tell it to. It's sort of like a lower-level and longer version of the last Patron arc in the way it makes you feel like you're actually doing something big.