Opening address and Going Rogue preview.

Upcoming guest authors for AE: Mercedes Lackey and Troy Hickman.

Preview of Going Rogue: phenomenal! New graphics settings "Ultra Mode" puts things like shadows and more realistic looking city settings.
Preview of dual pistols was amazing. Think John Woo action flick with lots of movement and tricks. Dual pistols avail for blaster primary, corruptor primary, and Def secondary.
Going Rogue will be a transitional storyline that your character goes through.
New zones in Praetoria look amazing. New start area and new tutorial too!

Totally awesome!

-Hot Mamma

With hitting lvl 50 last night my friend celiaelani mentioned to roll another fire blaster on a different server. Suffering worst altitis evar I already think about a partner for her new toon.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

...as the LJ MOTD for a couple of days last week, I got my first lvl 50 hero, with Micro MedBot. Cajeput (@super staxxy) simul-dinged with me... simul-dang?

You can see the silly-ass video of it HERE. Tee hee!

Current Mood: cheerful

I rolled a dark/elec defender and actually she's pretty nice. She's great solo and in teams but somethings weird about her.
Her gamepartner is an elec/energy blaster and I think that's the snag. I also got a kin/elec and I'm not sure if I want two /elec defenders.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: pensive

I really didn't want to bug yall with these questions but I trust advice here more than I trust it from the official forums, so...

Rad/Sonic Defender - She is my "Solo-fender", a counterpart to the Emp that I rolled up to be team reliant. Radiant Siren is on Triumph, and will get to 50 (someday) without ever having been on a team. Thus, I am skipping Mutation and Fallout. I know these are great debuff powers, but since she won't be teaming, they'd be less than useless.

My main questions are about slotting, I know roughly what powers I want to take, but how to slot them? If it matters, I want to take hasten and I am pretty sure I can fit it into the build with three recharges.

RADIATION EMISSION
oAccelerate Metabolism - Obviously three recharge IOs (the third brings the recharge down from 234 seconds to 212, so I do think it's worth it), but what else? Do you slot it for endmod as well?
oRadiation Infection - I'd go for two endredux, two defdebuff, two tohitdebuff. But that's just me, and I'd bet money that no one else would do it that way! So please, tell me how you slot this power.
oChoking Cloud - two endredux, two hold, two damage procs?
oLingering Radiation - Accuracy, two recharge, one endredux? Should there be a slow in there?
oEM Pulse - I'm tempted to skip this if only because it's one of those powers that completely drains your end, but I know it's a good idea to keep your "oh shit" powers handy. Thing is, how do you slot it? Should I slot it for recharge? My hope is that I wouldn't need to use it often enough to need recharge, but maybe I'm missing the point and this power will be oft-used?

SONIC BLAST
oSiren's Song - Should I even take an AoE sleep, as I will be using a lot of AoE/cone powers? If so, how should I slot it? I could six-slot it (ACC ACC SLEEP SLEEP RANGE RANGE) but that feels like such a waste.
oDreadful Wail - Again, I could six slot this, but it's another total end-drain, so I'm not sure what direction to go. Usually this doesn't bother me on other toons, but they'll usually be on a team where someone can help with recovery. Siren won't have that luxury.

DARK MASTERY
oOppressive Gloom - Two accuracy and two stun? I dunno, I've never actually taken the dark epic pool.
oDark Consumption - I want to put ten slots into this power. Help!
oSoul Drain - This may be my level 49 power so I may only have four slots, but if I absolutely need six slots I can move something else to 49. So, slotting advice please!

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Now that I've hit 43 I want to respec my Rad/Dark Defender for the push to 50. This guy only plays on our SG and the party is made up of my guy, a Tanker, 2 scrappers, a Blaster and an Earth/Rad controller. Given the team only nature my attempt is to build Ol' Dark Rad Lad as full blown support for the team with little expectation for damage output.

Please provide me with your feedback, especially on my slotting choices. Thanks!

( The Build )

What's the ultimate Blastfender build? I am thinking Radiation/ for the debuffage, and /Sonic for the -RES (which will increase damage). Skip the ally-target powers in Radiation. Take hover, stealth, combat jumping and acro, all slotted for defense (total of 15.1% when done) - or in acro's case KB protection (with KB IO I can get over mag 15 KB protection). Throw in as many damage procs and uniques as possible.

The goal is to get a defender from 0-50 totally solo. Any suggestions?

I also rolled an Emp/ that I want to get to 50 without ever having damaged a foe. She's gonna have leadership, recall friend, possibly group fly, grant invis, the works. Dedicated defender, no foe-targeting powers (aside from the first power in the secondary, which I have already removed from her tray).

Suggestions there as well?

Funny, the dedicated defender has slots and power choices to spare, and the blastfender build is looking ... really tight.

Edit: Yes, I know that almost everyone here either hates empaths on principle, or hates empaths who ignore their secondary. I do too. This is an experiment, and I will be clear about that on every team. I don't consider it too much of a leach because my main, who is FF/Psy, doesn't do much in the way of attacking - but I'd be pissed if anyone said she wasn't a good defender. Again, this is an experiment. I'm not going to "subject" anyone to her that doesn't want to be involved.

EDIT 2: I am bowing out of the empathy discussion now. As such, I am freezing those discussions. Yall have at it with sledge hammers til the mods come in in some other location, start your own thread and have fun, but I'm done. Thanks to everyone who actually answered my questions.

Hi! I just wanted to share with y'all a personal challenge I've been working on for myself.

Which is getting all the defender primaries to level 32 or higher. I'm doing really good!


( I made a table for this! )

So are there any ATs that you play 'gotta collect 'em all' with?

I finally got to level 32 on my dark/dark defender and picked up dark servant. What do people usually slot it for? Do you worry more about set bonuses more than enhancing dark servant? It seems like you would mostly slot it for heal or immobilize.

I tend to think of things in terms of spectrums (spectra?), instead of trying to put things into nice neat categories. Because often times things can possibly fit into multiple categories, and sometimes things don't fit neatly into any. So I got to thinking about defenders as AoE and Single Target, and as Enemy Effects versus Ally Effects. Because, you see, one day it popped into my head that in many ways Trick Arrow is the opposite of Empathy. Whereas Empathy affects only Allies and is slightly more Single Target oriented, Trick Arrow affects only foes and is mostly AoE. So I decided to actually create the spectrum and see how it went.

Yes, I realize this is further proof that I am a total and complete City geek.

Powers like Howling Twilight affect both allies and enemies (ally heal, enemy debuff). Powers like Repulsion Field and Disruption Field target allies, but only actually affect enemies. Please click the thumbnails for larger images.

DEF: // BLA: // CON: // TANK:

Please Subscribe to this post if you would like to be updated as I do more of these.

( Lots O' Questions! )

Current Mood: chipper

So is it feasible to believe that ice domination will be available to controllers and thermal radiation will be available to defenders... sometime in the near future.

I know this info is probably available somewhere, but I have no idea where to look. I am a controller altitis sufferer and I would like to make Ice/Ice someday.
Thanks in advance.

B/C I'm an Alt-Oholic I'm going to make a new toon. This toon's focus is going to be mainly on healing (a pure healer). Let me get to the point here...I've seen a lot of Doctor and Nurse toons in my little 7 months of Play time and I myself want to create one...I checked on char creator and my options seem limited...is there a pack or costume piece I can purchase to customize my toon so she won't look so generic? I've seen some amazing nurse toons and now I'm wondering where did they find those costume pieces!

After 383 hours, and more than 2 years of play-- ClaireVoyant has hit level 50!

Screencap of the event!

A big thankies goes out to everyone who has helped me, and teamed with me over these past 2 years! Level 50 isn't the end of CV's effort to stop evil, as the galaxy is endless, and things are just getting started!

I love my character (Agent Blake, Dark/Psi Defender on Justice), but she is proving to be nearly un-solo-able.  Which is really annoying for someone like me who LIKES running solo about 75% of the time.  She JUST dinged lvl 30, but I'm wondering why she's proving so hard to play.  (I'd have to jump back into the game to get her full powersets.)

By comparison, my Grav/Kin controller, who I started out thinking, "God, this is never going to work," now routinely wades headfirst into mobs and starts slinging them around (especially when she's got the Singularity active).  People had warned me that grav/kins started slow, but I still ran her solo 50% of the time and she got by decently - not great, but decent.

Do dark/psi defs ever reach a point where they CAN solo?  Or is this one build that really just needs to team? 

*****

Totally unrelated to the above post  = Doug, don't forget... you're supposed to wash your feet since I didn't win.

*****

Also totally unrelated to the above post = I need to surround myself with intelligent people today... I've been dealing with two retards who are sapping my will to live.  Please give me COH/COV humor, I need it desperately.

Michelle
aka
Samurai_ko 

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who shared comments and suggestions on soloing defenders (especially with Psi as a backset).  It's given me much food for thought on how I want to build future Defenders. :)

Current Mood: cranky

I missed the 'what ATs do you just not like/not play' thread, but I just read it. Interesting.

But I must ask all my fellow players afflicted with altitis - what do you find yourself rolling up over and over, and what have you told yourself 'okay, this time I'm gonna roll this and actually PLAY it'?

Hi, I'm A2K, and I'm a kinetics FREAK. I have more played more kinetics than anything else - it's a swiss army set of FUN. Everything I need but defense. I've been trying to get off my kin jag and let other people play it - so now I'm hooked on my TA/A...and I now have four varieties of TA running around! Sheesh!

Next!

Okay, I am not trying to call Doom here. But these kinds of statements scare me.

July 17, Castle says:

Buff/Debuff effects are additive, and are massive "force multipliers" for teams. In theory, buff/debuff sets pay for this with lower offensive/soloing capability.

In practice, do to the additive nature of things, the benefit is grossly better than the cost. We've known that for a very long time. Even if we hadn't figured it out ourselves, Repeat Offenders publicly leveraged the mechanics to do stupidly difficult things easily.

So. What are we going to do about it? Not much. There are a few points that I want to iron out (exploitive stacking of Vengeance *is* going away once we get things settled) but the general case of additive Buffs/Debuffs is going to remain as is. Why? Because changing that would alter the core teaming dynamics of the entire game. It would be a change far greater in magnitude than either ED or the GDN -- probably more far reaching than both combined. Simply put: Despite it being a weakness of our system, it is not a weakness we can address without changing the very nature of our gameplay.

All of this isn't to say that all content everywhere will obey the same rules. There may be times, places or specific encounters where we change those rules. To date, those are few and far between, but I do expect there to be more of that sort of thing in future encounters.

I'd argue that the defensive capabilities of the other ATs are FAR TOO HIGH. When I was reworking Defiance for Blasters, I tried to slip in a major decrease to their defensive caps. I don't recall the exact numbers now, but it was something like 33% max defense and 50% max resistance. Obviously, that was shut down since the values remain unchanged.

Why should AT's be confined to one side or the other?

Discuss.

Enervating Field gives a -22.5% damage resistance debuff; this cannot be enhanced. A single application of effectively gives approximately a 30% increase in a team's damage output (assuming critters with no damage resistance to start with). [Damage = original damage / (1 + damage resistance).] Two applications of EF yield a -45% damage resistance debuff, which means an 80% increase in a team's damage output!

What is a good way to describe these increases? I think damage buff would be wrong. For example, if I have an attack that does 75 points of damage out of the box, and I have one damage IO in it for 25%, then my understanding is that with two EFs on my target, my attack does 75 * 1.25 * 1.8 = 168.75 damage. If the 80% were a damage buff, the formula would be 75 * (1.25 + .8) = 153.75 damage.

Or, am I misunderstanding what "damage buff" means?

[ETA] Oh, I see, I have the formula wrong. I was confusing resistance to damage and resistance to status effects. ParagonWiki shows the formulas are

damage: SufferedAmount = AppliedAmount × (100% – TotalResistance)
status: SufferedDuration = AppliedDuration / (100% + TotalResistance)

terrycloth

So here's the deal. I have characters for team play, with my SG. I also have a solo character, for those times when nobody's on or I just feel like playing for 20 minutes. For some time now, that solo character has been my DM/Regen scrapper. But he's at 49.5 and when I'm done playing him, I'll be semi-retiring him, as badge hunting doesn't hold much thrill for me.

Therefore, I need a new solo character. This is for pure soloing, not PUGs. I don't join PUGs except for TFs or on double XP weekends. This is why the /regen scrapper worked out so well for me. I could just wade in and he could handle himself pretty well in battles - not always, but often enough to be fun. :)

What I currently play heroside are the DM/Regen scrapper and a fire/elec blaster (I also played a storm defender for some time). Villainside, I play my fire/thermal corruptor almost exclusively, but I have a thug/dark MM I bring out once in a while. I haven't created new alts in ages because I wanted to concentrate on my mains. The blaster, defender and corruptor are all "team players" for my SGs.

I don't mind creating another /regen scrapper if that's the best pure solo option, but I'd also like to try something different. What recommendations are there on either red or blue side for a pure solo AT?

ETA: Wow, so many suggestions! Thanks to everyone, I'll try to respond individually as time allows, you've all given me lots of great ideas. Thank you!