So Blasters never got fixed?

When you're using the secondary that caps out three times higher than those buffs? Its possible I might blink once or twice. There might be some actual eyebrow ascension.

Hahaha there's just no point in playing SR. Play a TW/FA Scrapper like a champ. Shadow meld and Demonic Aura when you need it! You can get 50% uptime on the former. If you really feel that you need it, DDR ageless. But you can hit 32.5% to all positions (Defensive Sweep for Melee,) with 50% uptime on Shadow Meld, and still have Burn and Fiery Embrace. There's just no discernible reason to play SR or anything else but FA at the high end...

UNLESS...

You make a Mental Blaster!

Because, especially with the blast set buffs... Way faster spawn clearing speeds via crashless nukes. And not only the ability to solo GM's like a champ... Which even the best Scrappers struggle to do, assuming they can do it at all (I know my purpled out TW/FA can't...) You can do it quickly and efficiently on an i24 Fire/Ment! WINNING!

If I'm going to play something with both Titan Weapons and Shadow Meld, I might as well play a Stone Tanker so I can be immobile while I'm being inactive.

If I'm going to solo Giant Monsters, it'll be on my Ill/Rad while eating a sammich and watching TV.

lul, defensive overkill...? Fiery Aura or gtfo. Why would you play Stone? /FA will do more damage. The entire point is to be able to live to a reasonable extent in all situations.

If I have to choose between having:

50% uptime on Shadow Meld, with Burn and Fiery Embrace, plus moderate resists and a self heal...

VS.

A recharge debuff gimping my spawn clearing speeds, AND no fiery embrace or burn, slowing my kill rates even more... Even against ST's... Wow I must be a retard! Good thing I can sit here and spreadsheet survive while I think about how stupid I am for not going FA!

Also, you play MA on your main, I think...?

Titan Weapons wrecks MA. My TW/Fa crits AND hits for over 1k damage on 2 of the attacks in his ST chain. He also has room for -res procs in said chain, and he even has the damage to compete with my SS/FA Brute's AOE speed, if he had a full time taunt aura.
O yea? Ill/Rad sounds sweet! Pretty sure I've heard of it! You mean that one FOTM set that can't even PL or farm at Tank speeds...? That one trick pony, who can solo GM's, but can't even clear max difficulty spawns at a fast rate? Kewl!

If I want to be rooted that much I'll turn into a tree.

Yes it does. Assuming you PL it to 50. If you actually play your characters instead, Titan Weapons only wrecks MA if you don't kill yourself first. Death is the ultimate debuff, especially when it happens on that side of the keyboard.

I'll take a tree pumping out more damage than a SR build moving around more but contributing less any day. Not sure what you're talking about though, honestly... Attacks that root you work into your playing rhythm eventually, to the point that you don't even notice it anymore but still see the high end numbers.
Haha.. Playing below 50 is intentionally subjecting yourself to the worst debuff in the game. I don't know how you can try to talk about your main, being MA/SR, and then say "Well, it was awesome 8 years ago, when it wasn't even level 50 yet!" with a straight face. Play on Freedom and you'll have a real Scrapper at level 50 within a day, so you can START playing it.

The end game is how you evaluate serious performance. I'd love to see your AOE clearing speeds, your ST DPS, and your ability to survive maximum difficulty settings when you INTENTIONALLY perform and play below max level. Playing below level 50 and exemping is choosing to nerf yourself.

And sure- It can be fun sometimes! I have two new characters that I'm currently playing through each level at the moment, in fact!

The difference is that I don't think their performance MATTERS. I'm making a CHOICE to play below the optimal level of performance. Obviously it's going to be a grind fest, because as soon as I've played them for over 3 hours, they could be level 50 anyways for nothing but some inf.

I just don't get the "Arguing for the Rights of Low Level Characters" thing. Low level characters are casual alts. If they were anything but casual alts, they would be purpled out and level 50 already. What is the point in trying to justify characters based on that premise...?

Playing at 50 is just a crutch for people who can't calculate attribmods in their head. If I want to jump straight to level 50 performance I just design my characters in the costume designer and then play the game in my head before I go to sleep. It takes less time than PLing on Freedom and zoning is faster.

Prove it.

All I've ever seen you prove is your theoretical knowledge of the game, which is awesome. I'm not saying you don't know your stuff...

But say, I'm a goaltender in the NHL. I have a great theoretical understanding of how to be awesome at playing goalie in hockey. I know how to cut off angles, I know how to cover rebounds and take away shots. I can sit here and explain it to you all day, and maybe my theories and my views will be awesome! But that doesn't just mean I know how to actually play.

You talk a lot of smack, and as justified as your smack might be, I've never seen you actually pull it off.

I actually have the characters I talk about. I worked hard on them to get them where they are. I might be the jerk to a lot of people in this discussion, but the fact is that my mains would trump your mains when it comes to in-game performance, based on everything I've ever heard you say about your actual characters.

I just think that's lame. If you're going to be such a big presence in a game that you clearly feel very passionately about, I just don't see the point in not being awesome at it first.

Hahaha yes! I love being called a *redacted*, bully;And I love arguing about COH stuff. It makes me feel like the game is just gonna last forever.. This is a big part of the fun for me.

As a fellow registered Fraps user, I appreciate her heads' up about the new version's performance increase. I might actually bother to upgrade it sometime this week instead of ignoring it for the next two months.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Er, did someone call you a bully? I missed that. Unless it was me, but I didn't want to call you a bully. Or a redacted.

If I came across that way, I apologize. I just love the arguing.

Wow, you so do not get other people's perspective at all.

50 is not "the game". Forever and a day, CoH has provided an environment where the point is the journey. 50 has never been the end-all, be-all.

I play 50s most of the time. I happen to enjoy that most of all. So I get where you're coming from. But I enjoy seeing how my characters change when I add one new power, or three new slots. I enjoy seeing what they can do against something new that they've never fought before, even it its a very prosaic fight nothing like soloing a GM.

So I get that other people might prefer the latter progression experience more than the "haha, I am god here!" experience of being a tweaked out 50. And the game should allow both to be fun and balanced. We can't ignore the pre-50 game, because for some people, it's the part of the game that's most enjoyable.

That's only even possible or reasonable because the devs never assumed the degenerate case that 50 is where the game really starts. That concentrates too much of the player base there and screws the people who actually want to experience the progression through lower levels.

So while I can see your viewpoint, I also see that you're showing terrible, blinders-glued-shut ignorance of other viewpoints. You're allowed to like being a tricked out 50 more than any other state in the game, but you don't get to ignore that other people like other parts of the game. Fortunately for everyone, the devs never really saw things your way, and that's why the game was fun for both types of people, or those like me who enjoy both.

Many people feel better about themselves if they decide that the part of the game they focus on and care about is the only one that matters and that anyone should care about. If you define what 'good' is, then you will always be 'good'.

While I tend to agree with this statement it seems to characterize the game as having a much more consistent vision than it actually did. IOs are a good counterpoint to that. They are all heavily biased to max level builds as difficult as it was for some people to make IO build, making exemplar friendly builds truly a PITA. It had been getting worse with newer powersets where the builds fell apart without particular powers. Time without farsight comes to mind, Kin is an old one that I try to forget about without set bonuses and pool defenses it became really painful. With the upcoming snipe changes you would have had even more brittle builds when it came to exemplaring.

Mighty Mouse.

You're a goaltender in the NHL.

A lot of us just aren't impressed by what you do in game. Despite your frequent posturing about protecting the details of your build(s), neither your Arch/Ment nor your Fire/Ment would be difficult to reproduce, in broad strokes. The strengths of those builds are self-evident and easy to exploit; neither would be particularly difficult to play.

Don't get me wrong; your over-the-top schtick amuses me, and I don't think you're a bad guy. But you are not, in my estimation, an expert on the game's mechanics or on build strategies. For my part, I've done the Drain-Psyche-abuse thing a few times in various ways with my Fire/Ment over the years, and although it was fun, it didn't hold my interest.

No one here needs to prove anything. A lot of us got the LOLOMG-uber stuff out of our systems back when you could herd the whole of Crey's Folly into a dumpster and one-shot everything with Knockout Blow. Sure, the first guy who did it might deserve some tiny bit of credit just for the discovery, but the thousandth guy, who learned the key elements of that tactic more or less by rote? Not so much.

In any case, it seems a bit silly to squabble now. Much love to all CoH peeps, and whatnot.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I think you're easily impressed if you're surprised that being abrasive and throwing your weight around provoked a negative response.

I'm just glad that I ruffled your feathers so thoroughly!

Making impressive builds is a big part of the game. Whenever I decide to purple out a new character, the first thing I do is spend an extensive amount of time researching character capabilities, peak performance and sustainable performance. I feel like an Archery/Mental/Mu Blaster is the height of all of the above in the current and now final game climate; Fire/Mental/Mu would have been much more optimal post i24 and I moved resources around accordingly.

It's "easy" to play because I put in all the leg work coming up with the ideal build philosophy. Where */Mental/Mu is hardly a new idea, it's mostly used for either farming in the case of Archery or big game hunting in the case of Fire.

The ideas are seldom wed, since the farming crowd generally prefers taking a resist toggle and building low amounts of s/l defense, with perma Drain Psyche.

The pylon crowd prefers to softcap s/l with a Mace shield and rely on defense for enough survivability to pump out enough DPS to solo big game.

I wed those two ideas through my build philosophy of taking a resist shield, building perma Drain Psyche, AND building all positional defenses to a small purple inspiration from the softcap.

The builds strike you as easy to play because they're revolutionary in common Blaster build philosophy. My approach to building a Blaster is durable and self sufficient without sacrificing either damage output or survivability, and in fact capitalizing on all of the above to an unprecedented thorough extent on a single build, throughout the entire game, as far as I can tell.
Here I disagree. I might not have contributed to developing the fundamental ideas or tools that Arcanaville and TonyV did, but I definitely applied said ideas and tools in the most advantageous way possible.
That would be reasonable if it weren't for the fact that the game had changed so much since those days. It's really a completely different set of goals now, and the same build principles that were applicable back then are no longer relevant in the modern game.

See? I told you guys. She meant that metaphorically. I am now the unequivocal champion of the forums.

I am not angry. I still think this discussion is pretty darned funny.