Are the Wolf/Crab Armor Powers WAI?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-05-25 10:27 in Soldiers of Arachnos
I've always treated the Resistances as "bonuses" to the powers, the main focus of which has been the auto-power mez-protection available at level 1. Granted, as you mentioned, Crabs get that with Fortification as well, making their armor power seem a little lacking when compared with Banes, but in either case, I don't think the devs have said anything about them one way or the other.
Crab Fortification + Tough ~= Scrapper Resistance Sets + Tough ~= WAI due to Crabs having higher defensive and resistive modifiers.
Example: Click this DataLink to open the build!
As for the passives, I've always assumed it was because the focus of those powers was to be a toned down 25% version of Static Shield or Obsidian Shield.
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Huh, never looked at ti that way. That does sort of make sense but it seems an odd way to balance it if that is the reason.
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Originally Posted by Linea_Alba
Crab Fortification + Tough ~= Scrapper Resistance Sets + Tough ~= WAI due to Crabs having higher defensive and resistive modifiers.
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Well, for one, those passives give you mez protection. Even if the 3% is too low, the mez protection alone makes me love my SoAs. |
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Ok, this has been bugging me for some time. The Wolf and Crab Spider Armor powers have those tiny 3% S/L & 2% Psionic Resistance. Have the devs ever actually stated why they set the values so low? Other than allowing the power to function as a mule for a +3% defense IO they don't really seem to serve any purpose (especially the Psionic Resistance, since they lack any other Psionic Resistance to stack it with).
This is then compounded by Fortification. It has a lower value for S/L resistance than the other resistances which seems really odd when compared to the armor sets on melee characters. If you look at the other sets they generally have four resistances at the same level and then for the last pair either both are slightly higher (i.e. S/L in Invulnerability) or one is much higher and the other is lower (i.e. Fire/Cold in Fire Armor). Having four the same and the other two lower just seems odd, especially since I would expect S/L Resistance to be the best for a Crab Spider (most NPCs with physical armor have S/L resistance). |
Second, even if the defensive values are lower than regular Defensive set in Scrapper/Brute, your SoA is buffing the whole team too with great defense-against-all.
Technically, Crab should have less defensive value than Scrapper but with set bonuses, Crab can be turned into a mini tank. Crab is like a mini tank with awesome pet damage and great team buffs and resistance debuffs.
I can accept it if SoA has less survival and they should honestly. (but the truth is some SoAs like Fortunata has like god-mode defense with Mind Link, control, range attacks, excellent mez protection).
On my Soldier, I usually take two passives because they really don't need any more slot and +resistance is a lot harder to get than +defense. Use it to slot -knockback or more psionic resistance. There is really not one bad power in SoA sets. All have its use (well, except for Bane's mace beams which I hate).
What's left is to normalize all Assassin Strikes and improve Stalker's old sets (Claw, MA and EM)! You don't need to bring back the missing PbAoE attack. You just need to make the existing ones better! For example, make Slice a WIDER and LONGER cone.
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I don't disagree with any of that. To be honest it's the Fortitude bit that really bugs me. It just seems counter-intuitive to how resistance is handled both for other sets and NPCs almost as if Crabs are expected to be getting more S/L resistance from somewhere.
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Originally Posted by Jibikao
Well, for one, those passives give you mez protection. Even if the 3% is too low, the mez protection alone makes me love my SoAs.
Second, even if the defensive values are lower than regular Defensive set in Scrapper/Brute, your SoA is buffing the whole team too with great defense-against-all. Technically, Crab should have less defensive value than Scrapper but with set bonuses, Crab can be turned into a mini tank. Crab is like a mini tank with awesome pet damage and great team buffs and resistance debuffs. |
They are expected to get more S/L.
If it was balanced otherwise, they would be able to get 70 S/L, which is higher than any scrapper off the top of my head.
Otherwise, they would need different modifiers on Fighting:Tough, but not other Pool Powers, or different custom versions of fighting that only apply to crabs. I'm pretty sure game mechanics wise those exceptions were considerably harder to deal with than to simply make the changes in the crab only power.
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I don't buy that. To my knowledge there is no other case of a power set power being balanced around the assumption that you have a particular pool power.
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Originally Posted by Linea_Alba
They are expected to get more S/L.
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Mabye the devs just wanted crabs to have a hole in their defense? Also, with tough, their resistances [to s/l] are huge for a ranged/support class. I know that its very customizable, but I don't think the devs had any other choice but to reduce the Crab's S/L so that the crab wouldn't be a mage-tank without very heavy investment.
Whining about everything since 2006.
Ammo switching for Dual Pistols was my idea:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=135484
Ok, this has been bugging me for some time. The Wolf and Crab Spider Armor powers have those tiny 3% S/L & 2% Psionic Resistance. Have the devs ever actually stated why they set the values so low? Other than allowing the power to function as a mule for a +3% defense IO they don't really seem to serve any purpose (especially the Psionic Resistance, since they lack any other Psionic Resistance to stack it with).
This is then compounded by Fortification. It has a lower value for S/L resistance than the other resistances which seems really odd when compared to the armor sets on melee characters. If you look at the other sets they generally have four resistances at the same level and then for the last pair either both are slightly higher (i.e. S/L in Invulnerability) or one is much higher and the other is lower (i.e. Fire/Cold in Fire Armor). Having four the same and the other two lower just seems odd, especially since I would expect S/L Resistance to be the best for a Crab Spider (most NPCs with physical armor have S/L resistance).