The Single Most Damaging Attack

An alternate suggestion is to do ice/x/dark (defender app).
Between slotting (~97% +dam), aim (42.5% +dam), assault (15% +dam), some decent IO bonuses (~20% +dam), and saturated soul drain (102% +dam). = 276% +dam
You'll be a small red away from damage capping blizzard/icestorm. At that point the /x/ part of your build probably has a -res power like sleet, freezing rain, tarpatch, EF...etc, which will make you even more damaging. Not to mention that the debuff sets usually have an easier time ensuring things stay within the kill zone of the rains for their duration compared to /kin.

In fact, using dark mastery with decently high recharge (base 120 sec rech, 30 duration) has many of the benefits of fulcrum shift to the user while still allowing you to pick up a superior survivability secondary.

Personally, I was looking at a near-perma soul drain fire/storm/dark corr and the damage looks pretty ludicrous.

What are you going to do with all your spare time when this game is no longer being supported by its company?

There are other games out there you know.
Both MMO and P&P.
Arcanaville has played them before and it's not unlikely she'd find another game to run the numbers on.
Obviously she was doing something before CoH launched. The odds are good she will do something after it shuts down.

Or she might get involved in creating an MMO.
Perhaps not the most likely outcome, but she has expressed interest before.

Still, i suspect that your question was mostly rhetorical, especially considering your abbreviation of her post. Have fun with that.

Honestly, this is the only one I've been really interested in making that sort of contribution for. I sorta did for that other superhero game for a little while, but for a variety of reasons I didn't pursue it further. I'd actually rather play anonymously than be the numbers guru: that sort of happened by accident here, and unlike in essentially every other MMO I've played since I had a direct channel to provide feedback to the devs almost from the start, even if it was only the QA people originally.

Once upon a time I was one among many: Havok, Circeus, Buffy, Picrow, many more that aren't around anymore. Some others are in semi-retirement: Stupid_Fanboy, Stargazer, etc. I just happened to have invented a lot of refinements to what people were already doing, and cast the widest net across the whole game. But I wouldn't have done it if I was doing it alone.

I'm not too worried about what I'll do with all my free time once this game shuts down for good, firstly because I don't think that's going to happen any time soon, and second because its not like I don't have tons of things waiting to suck up my time.

I will admit that the thought of being able to design the mechanics of an MMO from the ground up is attractive. But you have to be very lucky to get a chance like that. I've been pretty lucky in terms of being able to put my theories** into practice, but not that lucky.


** I believe when it comes to game mechanics, the best changes are ones everyone quickly forgets about, if they even notice, because the change seems so obvious people start to think it just always worked like that. It used to be a conjecture of mine, but now its a theory. Take that for whatever its worth.

This.

qft

My thought would be photon seekers from the peace bringer power set. If all three detonate and overlap the same target.

I know that everyone who uses a defense-based set should thank you every time they log on.

I'd pay money to read more of your ideas of how your dream MMO mechanics would work. It's something l like to think about myself.

I think the trick would be to leave lots of interesting and natural-seeming synergies without making it too exploitable.

I seen something do more than that. Remember when IOs first came out Touch of lady grey was bugged enough to 1 shot hamidon with his 99% resistance.

Damn it, i just responded to an earlier post with that one.

What would be better would be if I got 0.01% of the XP and Inf earned by every player that played a defense set. I should go talk to Television about that.

If one day you see a level 50 named Peter Gibbons giving billion inf costume contest prizes every day for a month in Atlas, well, you'll know who to thank when you log in that defense character.

True (and previously noted), but as also noted you can't see that happen anymore. Ditto the Kheldian slotting bug, and the falling damage bug. I think in terms of the most damage caused by a single power activation that can be witnessed by the players in the game under relatively normal circumstances, the Steel Canyon building explosions are still the highest. Hitting the Kronos Titan with the boom is just the extreme corner case. Being hit for a hundred times your own health is pretty high either way, though.

I'm still around, but due to time constraints I'm spending significantly less time on the forums.

So yeah, I suppose that could count as "semi-retirement".