In the Age of IO's, is SR obsolete?

Perhaps, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. Though, while they're at it, they could lower the damage buff and add in a -regen component instead.

lol

Mighty wide brush strokes there.

How about I turn it around and tell everyone what Your motivations are? You know fully well that your pet set is idiotically overpowered and don't want it nerfed for purely selfish reasons. You care nothing about game balance because it makes your epeen shrink up at the thought of any reduction in performance. Correct?

Oh. Do purple inspirations not drop from those enemies? Do you not monitor your defense so if it starts dropping you can eat one to stop the cascade?

Here's a shocking revelation: I play /SD without capped DDR. I fight all kinds of enemies. I haven't had my defense drop to the point where I might as well not have a secondary in...I don't even remember. Learn to play.

What about the min/maxers who love SD and love some other set as well? What do your amazing mind reading powers tell you about them?

Not bad, but I'd address this from the other direction.

IE, leave the buffage in AAO where it is, but raise the end cost, to, say, .42 end per second.

Then, to balance that out, lower the taunt aura down to willpower levels, or less.

Poof! All better.

Did you take my post personal or something?

I play a variety of sets. I play them on Brutes, so maybe AAO gets lost enough that it doesn't seem like a problem.

I play WP, Invuln, Ela & SD all at L50 and fully IOd.

Now that FA is getting some much needed attention, I'll probably invest in a serious build beyond just farming.

So performance changes on one of my characters has no effects on the others, and leaves my e-peen fully intact.


Nice try though.

This entire thread is min/maxers (myself included) debating min/max situations, where SD surrounded by enemies is better than SR - Joe average player doesn't care about this, never has and probably never will. I doubt joe average player even considered the idea.

Personally, I don't believe you. And the learn to play argument...that's so mature.


Additionally I understand more now about the scrapper forum, there'll never be agreement as there is too much ego flying around. I love the way you all refer to 'average players', as though you are some sort of superstar players. Yes some players are better than others, but spending billions on a character certainly helps bridge that gap.

By that logic everything is fantastic all you need is two medium inspirations. Grab a Kora Fruit mission and fill your global mail with them.

When you grow up, you may learn that the person making the assertion has the burden of proving it. You haven't even given anyone a reason to think your assumptions are valid except repeating yourself over and over again

And blasters never have to fight single hard targets ? I don't want to poke you on this but that is nearly as bad as Umbrals assumption that AAO runs flat out all the time, and there is no other source of plus damage available.

The superior AOE ability is a bit of a canard. While some blaster sets are superior in number of aoe powers much of that has to be factored out. Most blaster nukes are not particularly viable and have such long recharge times even if you can bypass their problems you couldn't use them often enough. The other nominal advantage of blaster AOE is that its large, well when you are on an at that can pull the enemies into melee range and survive to fire off the AOEs that advantage is considerably reduced. The inability of blasters to lead with AOEs when spawns contain mezzers also detracts from this.

By your argument, you lead me to believe that you have little to no Blaster experience with either teaming, pulling, fighting spawns in hazard zones, or in x8 missions.

If you believe that the Blaster AT is generally incapable of utilising their AoEs, which is what you're implying, then you're experiencing an entirely different MMO than I am and no argument I could provide would be sufficient.

Read what I said. Specifically the blaster paper AOE advantage is undercut by other limitations. I didn't say can't I said they don't get as much out of them. When you start talking about having to pull and team to use them effectively, it only reinforces the point.

When he said pull, I am pretty sure he was talking pulling an entire spawn in order to gather them up, much as you were saying a scrapper would do in order to cause spawn collapse.

Teaming is not actually seen as a disadvantage by most people. Therefore most people don't consider the fact that you may need a team as a limitation, since they were going to have a team anyway. I understand your point though and will tell a story to illustrate.

I logged onto a level 46 Fire/Fire/Force blaster I felt like playing and joined a LGTF. At one point, as the team formed up, I asked if they wanted me to switch to a scrapper or tanker. They said, "No, a blaster is perfect." Once we started the TF, they started running a speed LG. They spent precisely zero time buffing and the brute on the team ran to the end room. The rest of us were waiting at the beginning. Then in the second mission they started employing the same tactics and I kept up for two rooms, but rikti mezzing gets a bit much and the brute and scrapper were just charging at the EBs activating all the spawns in the room, but not actually aggroing anything. The leader then said, "Wait for x and x to get to the end room and TP the rest of us."

I was left with two choices. Play "watch other people play" or leave the team. When I asked if they wanted me to get a scrapper or tanker, I wish they would have said yes.

On the flipside, I'm often told that my opinions don't matter because I'm supposed to be some highly skilled player running around on the fringes of performance and thus have no understanding of how "normal" players play the game.

Yea, I find that to be total BS as well.

Ohh I though it was your post count that made your opinions not matter, silly me

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

Oh, yea, that, too!

.... are there too many commas in that sentence?

Just replying to what I'm being given.

Yep, because average players all spend billions on a character right? The very fact that we're willing and able to do that puts us outside the realm of "average."

Unless you're Electric, or Sonic, or Ice, or Energy....then it's not so much a case of being incapable of using your AoEs, as not having a lot of AoE to use (except in the case of Energy, where using your AoEs might actually interfere with using your AoEs). The whole "Blasters have superior AoE" argument falls apart when you start looking at sets that don't.

That is pretty much the way many TFs are going now. STF would have that but ghost widow makes large amounts of melee less desirable.

Citadel,Manticore, Numina, ITF are all being run in a similar manner and I have seen Master of Khans virtually soloed at high speed by tanks the team being mostly superfluous except for the final encounter.

Its not a really good situation for the game. I have to think the HVMs are an attempt to devalue speed tfing but that is a little like Ben Tre destroying the game to save it.

Then up the difficulty Or do what I've done when you have that toon on the TF who can solo most of it, go off and attack things yourself.

Yeah, the problem is there's no point in bringing toons that can't solo most of it. Of course the speed runners want you to bring that debuffer...they just don't care if you die as long as you're there to help with the AV.

And LOL at turning up difficulty. Trying to get most teams to do that is like pulling teeth.

OK, yes, "learn to play" might be insulting. But really? You think Eva is LYING to make a point? Look, Shield Defense has a lot of DDR even when it isn't capped. It'll slow down the cascade and lessen its impact significantly. If you have the reflexes to deal with, say, Regeneration as a set, then you have the reflexes to deal with cascading defense failure on a Shield Defense in most situations, IF you have the purples to do so. In fact, I recall only a single death on my Katana/Regen that can be attributed to cascading defense failure (Edit: Oops! No. I tried many times to beat Silver Mantis. Pretty much all those deaths were cascading defense failure.), which was when I got separated from the pack on an ITF, said "**** it" and charged. I've had a lot of cascading defense failure deaths on my Katana/Dark, but I was experimenting and practicing, pushing my way through a +4x8 Cimerorans (more deaths than spawns defeated), or +4x8 Arachnos (a few deaths per mission). But either can farm the wall just fine, and that's with 0% defense debuff resistance.

So I have no reason to doubt that even a passably-skilled player can manage cascading defense failure on a Shield Defense character IF they understand how. One VERY important piece of doing so, in my opinion and as stated by Eva as well, is to take advantage of the real numbers to monitor at least your base defense. When it goes red, you're debuffed, and you can quickly see how big the problem is and how big your response needs to be. Respond quickly, either by popping purples or running.

Since monitoring and just paying attention seem, to us at least, all that is required to avoid dying from cascading defense failure on a Shield Defense character, the "learn to play" comment is just a rude way of saying, "I suggest, if you're having problems with cascading defense failure, that you monitor your defense and if it starts dropping, eat a purple to stop the cascade". Problem solved, I would hope.

This thread is an EXTREMELY poor representation of how the Scrapper forum normally looks. You ARE right that there's a lot of ego flying around in the Scrapper forum, and I'm as guilty as any. But most of the time, our opinions are aligned, so there's a whole lot of agreement, and very little arguing. We spend most of our time being helpful.

Shield Defense, and whether or not it is overpowered, just happens to be one of our favorite arguments. It also looks like we're getting some outside help from more than just the usual suspects this time, helping to keep the argument heated.

I've spent literally thousands of hours playing Scrappers. A good portion of those hours are on hard-core optimized multi-billion influence level 50 builds. And I am not unusual in the vocal Scrapper forum crowd. And we're often striving to outdo each other's solo accomplishments, though as I've said in the past, we play a game of king of the hill where the goal is to get as many of us as possible at the top of the hill.

Would you prefer that we pretend we're REPRESENTATIVE of the player base? If not, we have to refer to the bulk of the player base in SOME way when having these discussions. If "average players" doesn't suit your palate, which term would you prefer us use to not offend you?

Yeah, that's annoying. It's like we're being told that our opinion would hold more weight if only we knew LESS about the game mechanics, less about powers, less about IOs, less about how to play the AT, and had less practice doing so. If only we were just average players, THEN we could give opinions on Scrapper intra-AT balance that MATTERED!

I usually start TFs at +1 or +2 difficulty without telling my team what my difficulty is set at

Actually, I find the experience to be very rare. Most people run slower than I want to go and most people do not want a TF to be played by one or two peeps on the team. I want to go fast, but I want to go fast together (mostly, splits happen at that speed, but splits are different than having 6 people wait for 2 people to play). I have no problem with speed runs, but I prefer it when they are whole team speed runs.

However, I was not telling that story to try to indicate that there is a problem where people are frequently relegating squishies into non-players. I do not think that is happening frequently. People seem quite happy to have blasters and while most teams do not bother to protect them very well, most teams do have a tank of some sort and simply letting them go in first is usually barely enough protection. I was simply demonstrating that I undertsand when you say that blasters have limitations that armored ATs do not have, while I was also stating that those limitations are frequently not a big deal.