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The OP link to the CO-Wiki also goes to the manual page. Just pointing out. I'll also post a few advice tips for each of the elemental projector sets, while I'm here, each centering around getting the most damage out of each: Fire  - The main multi-target combo for fire is Fireball(with Unstable Accelerant) and Conflagration. Fireball is a fairly potent AoE burst-damage blast, but is also a bit high on energy and slow to fire. With the advantage, though, it weakens the fire defense of the targets it hits. Meanwhile, Conflagration is a fairly damaging AoE with good energy usage and a wide hit radius. Combined with Fireball's defense-weakening mechanism, Conflagration does serious damage, even if you're not using an Offensive passive. - To backup fireball, Fire Snake is another good choice for wearing down enemy defense. An interesting thing to note about Firesnake, though, is that it actually reduces enemy defense against all elemental damage, so even an Ice or Infernal build can benefit from it. - Pyre and Flashfire are close relatives, and behave somewhat similarly; Pyre is a point-blank AoE fire explosion that, if fully charged, creates a burning patch of ground. Flashfire creates the burning patch directly underneath an enemy instantaneously, but also has a cooldown, so you can't use it rapidly. These moves are less critical for their damage, and much more that they apply the clinging flames debuff with great probability, meaning if you're using Thermal Reverberation, an energy return move that works off of burning enemies, these two moves are quite critical to keeping your energy up. Pyre is very useful for tank-type characters, while Flashfire can pretty much be used by anyone. Electricity  - If you're going to focus on using electrical attacks, it's imperative you pick up Ionic Reverberation,the electric energy return mechanic, as electric attacks are very endurance heavy. At the same time, most electric attacks apply the Negative Ions debuff fairly regularly, which means that you'll have a very good chance of getting energy back with this the more electric attacks you use. - For multi-target damage, it has to be Gigabolt. In the past, this move used to be stupid powerful, outdamaging pretty much any other electric move. In addition, it also used to be an endless feedback loop of Ionic Reverberation energy returns as it has a very high chance (50%) of applying Negative Ions on multiple targets. Now, since the rate of energy return on Ion-Reverb has been tweaked, you can't really do that anymore, but if you have the energy to do it, Gigabolt spamming can total most enemy mobs very quickly. If you're concerned about aggroing mobs behind the current mob you're targeting with Gigabolt, you might want to also look into Lightning Storm; while not nearly as outright damaging, it's a lot more sustainable and won't ever accidentally hit enemies further away than you want to hit. - Your best bet for single-target damage is Lightning Arc. On first glance, it's a fairly unassuming attack that does moderate damage to a single target that ramps up over time. If the target you are hitting with it is afflicted with Negative Ions, however, the damage ticks increase fairly substantially. By the end of a maintain of Lightning Arc, you'll be hitting your target for Gigabolt-spam damage levels, with way more energy efficiency, as the Ionic Reverb kicks in. - While it isn't strictly required for a good Elec build, Thunderstrike is a great choice for a PvE alpha strike, as it hits for great damage in a tight circle. If fully charged, every target it hits will be afflicted with Negative Ions, allowing you to use your other main combat attacks with more energy return. Ice  - Ice isn't really built entirely for damage, focusing a lot more on holding and freezing enemies. However, there is one standout power: Avalanche is the Ice equivalent to fire's conflagration and electricity's lightning storm, hitting for devastating damage in a wide circle. If you're focusing your character on Dexterity, taking the advantage of Serrated Shards is a must (Checking with an outside source, they say you need a 40% crit chance and a 100% severity for Serrated Shards to be effective vs. Rank 3.) - Most of the damage gotten out of ice was achieved by using Shatter after summoning up ice structures like Ice Barriers or Ice Walls, back before Avalanche was introduced. Though good burst damage, it's a fairly complex setup, and really is a lot less straightforward than just avalanching everything to death. - If you're set on going with ice, you'll actually find one of the simplest ways to get good single-target damage out is by using Ice Blast + Hard Frost: Since chill is a fairly common debuff applied by your build, using Hard Frost very well takes advantage of this, making even taps of this attack a reliable source of damage. Force  - Force is also not a pure-damage build, coming out as the all-rounder of the elemental projector sets. The one big-hitter of Force, however, is the Force Cascade; a gigantic, super-damaging blast wave of damage. The big downside of this move is that it is extremely costly in terms of energy; it's nothing like Gigabolt, which you can just repeatedly fire off to do damage. In order to get the most out of the cascade, you need to have high energy reserves and a way to get an energy form. I actually wouldn't suggest you use Kinetic Manipulation at all with a Force-Cascade centric build, as it offers little to no support in terms of energy handling. Instead, take Quarry, as the intelligence stacking will severely improve your energy efficiency. Mind that this doesn't count as an energy form, so on one hand, you'll not be able to fire off a fully charged cascade by default, but on the other, you won't lose your primary damage buffs once you fire a shot off. To alleviate your lack of energy form, you should take active click powers which enable them, such as Immolate or Field Surge. Probably the most reliable and quick way to get a nice, simple Energy form activated is to take the advantage on Force Bolts: Energy Refraction, as the mini-shield it generates does count as an energy form and will allow you to fire off a good shot of your cascade. -While I'm here, I might as well also discuss the big cherrypicker power of force: Inertial Dampening Field. IDF acts like a miniature version of invulnerability's flat damage mitigation, making rapid hitting, low damage attacks a lot less daunting. Especially in solo play, the effect is noticeable in making your character quite a bit more hardy, and if your build already is handling energy well, tacking IDF onto it wouldn't be a bad idea at all. Also, don't rank it up. The difference between R1 and R3 IDF's is roughly 12 damage, which is utterly miniscule. Just take it, toggle it, love it. -Speaking of energy, Force also hones one of the most valuable blocks in the game for characters who need extra energy: Force Shield + Force Sheath. In addition to generating more energy when taking hits while blocking, the advantage makes the energy-return on hit mechanic extend for a while after you're done blocking. If you enter battles right after tapping the block key, you can build energy that way alongside your normal energy builder and other energy return mechanics. E: Asimo posted:Power Armor meanwhile works perfectly fine, but the fact the powers work differently than others (being toggled for the most part, and mutually exclusive in use with non-toggled attacks) means it plays really, really poorly with other powersets. Power Armor's buffs are really good, but you want to stay far, far away from its attacks unless you're a dedicated PA build. Now with pictures. And a few spelling corrections. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Oct 31, 2011 |
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Jul 8, 2011 02:04
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Tsurupettan posted:I'm working on a character perfect for the Basement hideout: Orangefinger, the Space Elf Samurai High Technomagelord. Or, at least he is in his tabletop game. I want him to use a katana, and various magic/technology based pets, but I'm not sure where to start on powers. It feels weird mixing melee ability with stuff like pets/ranged abilities. There's a metric poo poo ton of pets to go around. The good thing about pets is that they don't really scale much with any stats anymore, so any build that doesn't have terrible energy issues can feel free to use them. The bad thing is that they hold you back on powers that make you more powerful, and can be very aggravating to level with (especially if they're melee pets.) Probably the most moderate and easy-to-use pets would be the support drones, as they usually don't rush off ahead into battle, and at rank-3, they almost always will point their healing beams in your direction, and they heal a lot. edit: I am terrible with phpbb tags.
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Jul 8, 2011 18:24
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Tsurupettan posted:Well, none of the energy unlocks seem very viable for this set up, being pet focused and all (plus a katana attack or two). Maybe just focusing on rec/end and taking something like, say, Aura of Primal Majesty to boost them further? Literally everything works with Aura of Primal Majesty. Heck, if you superstatted Dex/Ego with AoPM, it would probably work; by the time you reach 40, you'll have at least 300 in both your superstats and 100 in every other one. You'll be landing criticals much more often than other builds, have much more energy capability with high Rec, End, and Int, even your heals operate at increased effectiveness, and, like Quarry, you're set-agnostic, so you can throw any balance of blade vs magic in there and it would still probably work. Since you'll be landing criticals a lot, I'd maybe suggest using the Form of the Tempest, which will make your melee strikes do even more damage as you build focus stacks through critical hits, and also returns energy as you do this. If you still need help with energy, you might want to take a look at Force Shield with Force Sheath, allowing you to restore energy whenever you're hit. If it doesn't sound like your thing, I'm almost certain you could build a single-blade character that uses some pets and just stacks Rec/End (at least one of the two) a bit on top of his Dex/Ego superstats.
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Jul 8, 2011 18:52
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Asimo posted:
There are ways to completely break it. For example, Enrage stacks; with around 300 strength as a superstat, a single stack of enrage is going to give you a damage boost of around 20%. With full stacks running, you do damage pretty much on par with an offensive passive, alongside your other superstat, which I'd recommend to be con (to lengthen the duration of the Enrage buff and grant extra health) or int (to shorten the duration of the Enrage recharge and increase energy efficiency), you'll either have incredible amounts of health (a little over 9,000 at level 40) or excellent energy efficiency, alongside good energy reserves and a nice heal rate. I've heard of people doing similar things with Dex/Ego AoPM build, but actually haven't seen how well that would handle, mainly because it doesn't have the crazy base enrage damage backup, which can apply to any damage at all. Fake E:FB 
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Jul 8, 2011 21:52
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Hahah! Melee already was powerful enough before they noticed this. It'll probably make Quarry-based melee builds a little less effective in comparison, though.
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Jul 9, 2011 02:20
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Rolling forward on the damage guide, we're going to be covering the attacks of the technology tree. Though, if you're using the technology tree attacks, you're more likely than not making a character which is based entirely after a given powerset, so these tips will apply more as general build advice for these cases. Archery  -Archery, on paper, is supposed to be a ranged DPS combatant with fair single-target and AoE damage offset with uncanny defense for a DPS unit, so the defensive options this tree offers you kind of end up being the only thing worthwhile from this set if you're cherrypicking powers. --Quarry is a passive which boosts the damage of all physical damage fairly substantially, and all other damage to a degree as well. The damage buff scales off of intelligence, and will also build stacks of buff that further increase your intelligence stat, your ego stat, and your avoidance (how much your dodges decrease damage.) To make the most use of these mechanics, you'll have to superstat INT/DEX to get the superstat damage buff, and enough probability to land criticals with your elevated EGO. With the probability to land criticals with Dex or Ego alone introduced, as well as the damage scaling Ego could provide and the extra knockback, INT/EGO might also be a good option (if you don't mind statting 2 support stats.) Quarry comes out as one of the best offensive passives in the game, and can support any number of build types, from Munitions, to Power Armor, to even Throwing Stars and Ranged Bleeds. --A great tool for any dodge-based characters, whether based around offense or defense (via Lightning Reflexes), is Evasive Maneuvers, a reverse-lunge which increases your dodge chance quite substantially, even at rank 1. Combined with other dodge mechanics, such as Bountiful Chi Resurgence + Resurgent Reiki, and Parry + Elusive Monk, it's very possible to become highly survivable as an offense-based character, or nigh invincible as a defense-based one. --Probably the only redeeming feature about any of the archery attacks is the advantage on the energy builder: Strafe + Aversion, which causes you to have an increase in your dodge stats based on intelligence. It emphasizes the theory of the Archery build, and can be pretty useful in a pinch. It also means giving up several low-level move slots in exchange for either crappy archery attacks, or the good archery non-attacks, so you'll only want it if you're high level enough to have other attacks. And if shooting arrows for energy isn't your thing, then you can probably skip it anyway. -If you ARE planning to build pure archery, then here's what I can tell you about that. --Straight Shot is your initial attack, which remains useful to high-level archery characters for its advantage, Split the Arrow, which reduces target defense against your next two Archery shots. This is assuming you stick chiefly to Archery, so if any of your primary attacks are not archery based, you might as well pass this one. --The main AoE attack combo you'll use for lower levels is Torrent of Arrows + Storm of Arrows; Torrent of Arrows is better for starting a battle off, and when it crits, it can kill multiple henchmen all at once. Storm of Arrows provides more sustainable damage for the area, and has the unusual quirk in that it can hit more enemies than other area attacks. Which is completely useless in 1-player PvE.  --Higher level AoE will see use of Explosive Arrow, which has the advantage of having no recharge. The disadvantage is that it does fire damage, which isn't quite as strongly boosted in damage, due to Quarry's nature. Speaking of that, yes, you are going to want to use quarry with Archery. It already is one of the best passives in the game and it really is meant to directly augment this powerset. --So we have an archery build which gimps itself by using a ton of arbitrary recharges and can buff itself to extremely high INT levels? Why the hell is Hunter's Instinct even here, then? If you're going to take an energy return on this, take Gadgeteering's Molecular Self-Assembly, as the components of all the recharge your attacks and defense use will feed the energy right back into you. Gadgeteering  -Gadgeteering is the opposite of Archery in terms of its cherrypicking utility, in which it has some of the worst passives available to it, but has some extremely useful pets, attack utilities, and defensive options. --The energy return offered by Gadgeteering, Molecular Self Assembly, used to be a nigh-useless... Click power thing. Now, it's probably one of the most versatile energy-return mechanics available, and a great option to pair with recharge-based moves like Enrage, Conviction, and even Power Armor attacks. Since the energy return scales with intelligence, it's a very good idea to take this and the Int superstat if you use a ton of recharges. --Gadgeteers also get two of the best defense/healing options for less durable characters: Bionic Shielding and Support Drones. The support drones follow you around and will attempt to heal any friendly targets nearby. The advantage of these drones is that they can make you much harder to kill if there's no other friendly targets around, and at rank 3, their heals have a much higher chance of reaching you. The disadvantage of them is that they're not exactly durable, can get easily sidetracked by other wounded allies and even themselves, and at any rank lower than 3, will have a much lower chance of connecting their healing beams with you. Bionic Shielding will make it so that the next 5 hits you take will substantially heal you in return. Especially if many weak attacks are connecting, you can use this to quickly get healed and back to the fight. -Building around Gadgeteer offense, the build ends up playing like a City of Heroes character, with many recharge-based attacks; some which can hit really hard, but are also mostly slow. It's less about spammable, sustainable attacks in Gadgeteering, and much more about the side-attack options you have: --If you build chiefly around Gadgeteering, you'll most likely end up taking Munitions Bots for your offensive bread-and-butter. They're pretty good as hit buffers, even when turrets, so you'll want to switch them to that mode whenever in a big fight. Even when they die, they drop a cluster of mini-mines, which actually hit for a good portion of damage. --Another big feature of Gadgeteering attack utilities are the next-hit power buffs, Sonic Device and Toxic Nanites. Of the two, Sonic Device comes out on top, as it can interrupt enemy charge attacks to create and opening, and with the advantage, Sound Refraction, it can be used to stun multiple targets. Toxic Nanites is a decent DoT damage buff; I'm not sure if it gets buffed by elemental offensive passives, but compared to sonic device, it's pretty underwhelming, but still a bit useful. --Gadgeteers get a key alpha strike move, Orbital Cannon, which takes roughly 5 whole seconds to set up. When it finally lands, though, the damage burst is gigantic and devastating, especially if the target hasn't moved from the crosshair. You will definitely want to get the Anvil of Dawn advantage, as the continued damage bursts it can deal post-blast are also useful. --Finally, there is also their big melee hitter, Gauntlet Chainsaw, a high damage, high cost melee cone that can completely mess up entire mobs in close range. If you want to build around Gauntlet Chainsaw, I'd recommend picking up Quarry and a Martial Arts Focus Form for maximal damage and energy returns/efficiency. I'll cover more details on the execution of the endurance-based quarry melee fighter a bit later. --A gadgeteer will probably want to take either Electric Form or Invulnerability as their passive, along with appropriate attacks if based off of Elec Form. The primary experimental gun attacks under the roof of Gadgeteering are a little underwhelming in damage terms. --Though with the update to the Gadgeteer attack options, they do now have one very potent attack in Pulse Beam Rifle, which is a single-target maintain which ramps up in critical chance and severity the longer it's held. Taking the advantage on it, Finite Improbability Engine, will make it so that it deals out random debuffs to the energy during the maintain, which can be unexpectedly useful for defensive purposes: The criticals it generates, especially when using DEX/EGO, can hold its own offensively quite well. Munitions  -Munitions is basically Archery, except much more viable for solo play, thanks to its stronger attacks and more straightforward execution, with a build that has less defenses in general, but a lot more damage, based off of criticals. Munition attack advantages also provide an uncanny number of synergy possibilities as well. Since these alternatives usually are a little less effective than native power solutions, it's usually not optimal to cherrypick from Munitions, but otherwise perfectly viable to build a character based on the powerset. -I find there's two ways to build a munitions character; either go all-out with different weapons to create a ranged DPs build, or focus chiefly on the pistols to create a DPS/dodge mix with very unusual mechanics. --The primary single-target output for a munition build is Assault Rifle. The Assault Rifle's a bit unusual in its damage curve, in that the initial burst of damage is high, with the following sustained fire dropping off in damage immediately after, and then climbing back up. The most damage possible can actually be gotten out of the rifle by rapidly tapping it instead of repeatedly maintaining it. --The main solution for multi-target damage is SMG burst, which hits very rapidly in a cone. If you're building a ranged bleed build or want guns in your melee bleed build for some reason, the advantage of Aggression can be very useful for keeping the bleed pressure up on multiple enemies. Gatling Gun can be another fun solution to AoE damage, but I haven't seen it mentioned as much; the range is longer, but the cylinder is quite narrow, and good luck doing any good damage with it against an enemy with invlun/defiance. --Shotgun Blast is a good ability for interrupting enemy actions, especially with Breaching Round. The shotgun becomes even better if you use any sort of enrage mechanic, but can be very useful for its purpose even without it. --Though I'll be discussing it later for completely different reasons, Lead Tempest is hands down the best Self-Centric AoE attack in the game in terms of range. If you're a tank and need a quick way to catch enemy attention, take Challenging Strikes on the move and you'll be able to draw most aggro to yourself quite easily. -If it's your cup of tea for whatever reason, you can build a Munitions character based entirely around the different pistol attacks the game gives you. The result is a balanced DPS/dodge combatant with an unusual tendency to do best in melee range. --Two Gun Mojo serves as the primary tool for ranged damage in this setup. Though, the actual use for the move is to get a stack of enrage to feed its other two big-hitters. --Holdout Shot is an unusual attack that can serve any ranged-crit-DPS build very well; when low on energy, it will do twice as much damage as usual, and when it actually lands a crit, the damage doubles again, and so the attack becomes a good bridge-action for when you happen to be low on energy. The main disadvantage of the Holdout Shot is that the animation windup for it is really slow, so on higher PvE difficulties, it's likely the enemy might actually dodge this attack. If you need extra survivability, feel free to take its advantage, Stim Pack, which will apply a heal-over-time effect to you that starts out with a strong burst. Like the move itself, it can crit, and it heals for a lot when it does. --Bullet Beatdown, for the akimbo pistols build, ends up being the main output for damage, as the planned build uses a Martial Arts Focus Form (in this case, Form of the Master) to obtain energy returns. Consequentially, it also boosts melee damage, which makes the Bullet Beatdown come out as a super-damaging melee attack with a wide number of debuffs on each hit, ranging from roots, to even a chance to interrupt enemy actions. With the advantage, Not Without Incident, the attack becomes AoE by chance, or whenever enraged, and when combined with Parry + Elusive Monk, the attack also will make you more capable of dodging! --Closely related to Bullet Beatdown is the active defense provided by Munitions: Lock and Load; this ability will increase the damage of all technology-tree attacks for 15 seconds, but the main selling point of this move is its advantage: Two Smoking Barrels, which causes the recharge on this move to decrease by 2 seconds for each melee hit you land. Combined with a technique like Bullet Beatdown, you can run this offensive passive very frequently. This is yet another technique that's useful to a Chainsaw/Lasersword/Quarry melee build. This information is now outdated; Lock and Load now operates much more like a standard damage boost active. --Once again, Lead Tempest shows up here, but also with its advantage, Tread Softly. Combined with the dodge mechanics discussed above, it becomes the alternative to Bullet Beatdown for increasing your dodge chance/avoidance in a pinch, and once again hits in a wide ring for good damage. --Breakaway Shot is probably the least synnergized of the remaining akimbo attacks; it hits for a good burst of damage in a large cone. The fact that you backflip and move backwards while using this attack actually increase the scope of range the attack has quite considerably. The defiance stack it offers is also a good bonus, as it offers a laser-knight-esque defense without actually having to take that technique at all. --Munitions gets most of its damage from being energy efficient enough to build around the stats of Dex/Ego. However, the most effective way to build the Akimbo Pistols build is to once again take Quarry, as the Bountiful Chi Resurgence + Resurgent Reiki combo can actually be stacked up to Two Times in this build, thanks to heavily elevated intelligence. As a result, the passive offers this build elevated damage, with a sizable health-regen and elevated dodge-chances in the right situations. --Munitions is mostly so effective thanks to its energy return mechanic, Killer Instinct. This restores energy whenever you land criticals with munitions attacks. In the case of the Akimbo Pistol builds, using this means you have a chance to restore energy when taking hits, and when dealing them. If you're focusing on Munitions attacks, it's preferable to take it. --It's preferable to take an offensive passive with Munitions, as the damage output of munitions attacks is a bit lower by default; a defense-passive munitions character has very poor damage output, even when taking criticals into account. Power Armor  -Power Armor has the least cherry-picking powers of all, and, as stated in the OP, is very restrictive about out-of-set powers. Regardless, it plays a lot different than other powersets, and can be a ton of fun once you get the hang of its mechanics. -To make it perfectly clear, Power Armor is super costly in endurance. It can empty its entire energy bar within seconds by using 3 attack toggles at once; one in a shoulder slot, one in a chest slot, and one in the hand slot. The slots are detailed on the attack descriptions and only one attack per slot can be used. For summary, the different attacks for each slot are: Hand Slot powers -Wrist Bolter (w/advantage) -Concussor Beam Shoulder Slot powers -Eye Beams -Minigun -Shoulder Launcher Chest Slot powers -Micro Munitions -Chest Beam -Slot powers can only be used with one another; any powers that don't use these mechanics can't be used while these powers are enabled. -For the majority of the time, your main attack combo for sustained damage will be Concussor Beam, Minigun, and Micro Munitions; Concussor beam hits a single target and propels it backwards a bit, but does really good damage. The Minigun will hit like the Gatling Gun, hitting enemies in a line for rapid damage ticks. It's important to take Minigun's advantage, U-238 Rounds, as one of the selling points of Power Armor attacks is how much they can reduce enemy defense. Micro-Munitions fires rockets which explode around a central target. Also note that you can fire each of these attacks at completely separate enemies, so long as the angle between the different targets isn't more than around 70 degrees. -PA gets two good damage burst attacks; Chest Beam and Shoulder Launcher. It's preferable to take the chest beam, as it can hit both rapidly or be charged, does great burst damage, and further reduces defenses alongside the minigun. Shoulder Launcher can further augment the burst damage in a sphere, but lacks a defense-reducing mechanic, and can't be fired quickly at all. I think running out of energy also might interrupt the Launcher's priming period if it's still in that stage. -Power Armor should use one of three passives; either Quarry due to its intelligence stacking and energy efficiency, as well as boosting the wide damage types of Power Armor, Defiance for returning energy on hit, or even Targetting Computer combined with traditional REC/END stats, for an equal boost of all damage types that Power Armor deals (in exchange for some lost time with target priming). taking Force Shield is also important, as it further helps to build energy as you sustain damage. Finally, the key energy return mechanic to use here is Molecular Self-Assembly from gadgeteering, as it will cause you to regain energy whenever one of your Power Armor weapon toggles ends. You will want to build around all three stats of Intelligence, Recovery, and Endurance for all power armor builds, choosing the first superstat of Intelligence, and the second one of Dexterity if Quarry, or by using Constitution if Defiant, alongside Endurance or Intelligence. -In terms of cherry picking powers, I already mentioned Chest Beam in my previous tips post, but as Aphrodite pointed out, Laser Sword is the other; a super-fast hitting melee technique that can be buffed noticeably by either Electric Form or Quarry. Furthermore, its advantage, Particle Acceleration, makes it so that the enemy takes even more Particle Damage than before, so repeated hits from the Laser Sword will do even more damage, and that attacks like Gadgeteering's Orbital Cannon and Experimental Guns can now actually do some good hits. Since the attack hits rapidly and has a fairly high cost due to this, it can go alongside Gauntlet Chainsaw for the energy-efficient quarry melee build. -The counterpart to Laser Sword is Energy Shield + Laser Knight. Aside from being the overall sturdiest block in the game, the advantage of Laser Knight is invaluable to offense-based melee characters, as it offers a passive defense buff whenever you land a melee strike. If you're melee, aren't built explicitly around dodge mechanics, and have enough energy efficiency to fight continuously, Laser Knight can be an excellent choice if you don't mind having a honeycomb on your arm. Ironically, Energy Shield is completely useless to a Power Armor character. edits for slight tag error correction and better spacing. And spelling. And updating facts. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Oct 31, 2011 |
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Jul 9, 2011 21:06
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Once you're in the thick of battle, though, and everything around you already is aggroed, it does shine. Even when enemies are scattered all around the room and shooting you from afar, Lead Tempest will allow you to hit them all. The statement also was referring more to team play; I've seen quite a few tanks use it inside Therakiel's Temple to some good use. However, in open instances with wandering mobs and unpredictable respawn rates, yes, Lead Tempest is horrible. And with big boss fights, you might as well just get Crippling Challenge on one of your single-target attacks instead.
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Jul 9, 2011 21:39
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I think Micro Munitions is kind of small in terms of hitting range too, but it's the only sustainable area move you'll have that can hit in a sphere. In addition, every little bit of damage helps, and when all three of the attacks are hitting a boss, especially after a chest beam's worn them down, they're going to go down fast. I actually do agree about the point on Two-Gun mojo; it's... Okayish if you empty your clip on a boss, but half of the time, it's just going to waste time as you fail to get a full maintain off on repeated minions as they slowly die, and you also slowly die. Just getting enrage from the might tree would be a simpler solution for when you need the buff on your Bullet Beatdown. I just suggest it because it does work well in boss situations, fits the theme of the build, and doesn't require recharge or ranking like enrage does. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jul 10, 2011 |
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Jul 10, 2011 00:32
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I really hope people don't mind these really long posts on questionably correct build information.  Alright, onto one of my favorite set of sets in the game: The Martial Arts category. Every single one of them is a Melee Fighter set, each using critical mechanics to a degree. Because of this, it's quite viable to create Martial Arts characters which take techniques from each of the subsets. Dual Blade  - Dual Blade is all about extreme melee-area DPS. Used properly, you basically become a human blender that completely decimates anything within melee range. Simply put, it has some of the best melee techniques for damage out of the four, and is probably the most flexible. -- Your main source of single-target damage output is Dragon's Wrath, which has great energy efficiency, can tap fast, and charges fast. The best thing about Dragon's Wrath, and other Dragon moves for that matter, is that releasing a full-charge strike with them causes you to gain the Rush buff, which is an Energy-Over-Time buff. The buff lasts longer the more focus stacks you have, with 8 focus stacks producing a period of 8 seconds of energy restoration. For defeating bosses using Dragon's Wrath, it's preferable to charge up a full Dragon's Wrath stab and follow it up with rapid ones. -- The main solution for area of effect damage is Sword Cyclone, which is a maintain that hits all targets around you for rapid damage. If you're hurting for extra defense, though, Eye of the Storm is another excellent alternative, as it basically generates a shield for every second it hits enemies. If you take the advantage on it, Blade Beyond the Veil, every enemy in melee range which hits you takes damage, and so it becomes extremely viable for mob killing. These mentioned moves are pretty much the only real attacks you'll ever need as a Dual-Blader. It's a very effective, and very simple setup. -- Dual Blade's native Focus Form is Form of the Tempest. Out of all the focus forms, this one is the best suited to any offensively-geared critical melee character, as it will offer you extra damage and energy whenever you land your criticals. - Almost all offensively built MA builds are best off with Way of the Warrior as their passive; combining it with Bountiful Chi Resurgence and Resurgent Reiki, alongside Parry with Elusive Monk, the stacking dodges will make you much more hardy in melee range. This becomes even more true if you use Evasive Maneuvers from Archery in conjunction. Melee sets also do reasonably well with most defensive passives, as the focus forms they use provide enough damage buffs to hold their own in most situations. Fighting Claws  - On the flipside, Fighting Claws focuses on using a wide number of single-target techniques to wear down enemy defenses. First off, single target. Single target and nothing else, which is just awful. Second, the defense debuffs don't even matter most of the time because the setup is sort of awkward and the payoff tends to just not be worth it. -- The main reason said payoff isn't worth it is because of Dragon's Claws; this downward swipe of the claw acts almost exactly like Dragon's Wrath, but has the added bonus of an extreme bonus to crit severity. This makes it much more powerful than Dragon's Wrath in PvE circumstances; while DW can pierce some defenses, most enemies in PvE areas don't have any. Meanwhile, the raw damage that Dragon's Claws offers on crit will completely decimate high-health enemies without defenses, and because of this, all the other single-target attacks Claws has are rendered moot points. Single Blade  - Single Blade is bleed-centric; it has attacks which build and maintain bleeding effects on enemies as they slowly maintain damage, and then can use special attacks to end the bleeds in a massive burst of damage. Single Blade, versus claw, feels complete, but still isn't as simple an execution as Dual Blades or Unarmed are. -- The first thing you'll need as a blader is a technique which can build bleeds easily. Normally, this comes in the form of Reaper's Caress. However, this requires you to hit with a long and slow 3-hit combo, and generally has very bad DPS. If you don't mind being a cannibal, the best melee technique to easily get the maximum bleed stacks (5) is Bestial Supernatural's Bite, which will guarantee an enemy builds a new stack of bleed on full-charge. If you need to do this at range for whatever bizarre reason, Iron Lariat + Kyoketsu Shoge can also let you do this while drawing the enemy in. -- Scything Blade is a fair AoE cone which can cause a single or multiple targets to begin bleeding; if fully charged, all targets hit will have a bleed applied. With the advantage of Swallowtail Cut, this move can take down higher health enemies quicker, AND the swallowtail cut debuff counts as an entirely different bleed stack as well, which results in different damage distribution when dealing out a finishing blow. If you really need to have a large number of multiple targets bleeding, the best way to do it is with SMG burst + Aggression, which can really help rack up the focus stacks. -- The big finishing move of Single Blade is Reaper's Embrace. This move has some disadvantages; it has an extremely slow animation, and otherwise does fairly average damage if the target isn't bleeding. If it is, however, the bleeds will all transform into extra bursts of damage overlapping the main slash, consequentially making it very good for suddenly killing a strong target. The advantage on the move, No Mercy, can be used to help maintain your focus stacks and chain the attack continuously with repeated full charges until the advantage fails or the enemy dies. -- If for some reason you need to keep bleeds running while you build up more or something, you can take Dragon's Bite. As a dragon move, it will provide the rush buff on a full charge. Of all the Dragon moves, this one's probably the least notable. -- Single Blade's focus form is Form of the Swordsman strangely enough. This form is especially worth it if you have a way to get bleeds on many enemies at once, or are capable of building them up fast. Unfortunately, as explained above, this is only possible using powers from outside Martial Arts. Unarmed Martial Arts  - Unarmed centers all around dodging, with attacks that hit reasonably hard, but at the same time give the user dodge and avoidance buffs as they're used. Built properly, you can turn unarmed martial artists into nigh-invincible tanks. -- The big selling point of unarmed is Dragon Kick, which is not only a rather damaging cone attack, but when fully charged, it will stun all enemies in melee range, making it a fairly good interrupter. Alongside its advantage, Lashing Dragon Tail, it can be used to augment your dodging effectiveness for a good amount of time. -- The single-target attack that Unarmed gets is Burning Chi Fist, which does pretty good damage on rapid taps, but is quite energy costly. The full-charge bonus causes the enemy to sustain dimensional damage over time, which can actually be exploited in a very unusual way: By using a fear-educing attack such as Void Shift + Emerging Nightmares from the shadow set, or Howl from the bestial set, you can take advantage of the dimensional damage that you can get out of Burning Chi Fist by taking the energy return mechanic of Spirit Reverberation, which causes you to gain energy whenever dealing dimensional damage to a feared enemy. Furthermore, with Burning Chi Fists' advantage, Fists of Righteous Flame, you will be able to do dimensional damage with your other attacks, enabling you to get a reliable stream of energy as you punch scared enemies to death! -- Crashing Wave Kick + Subtlety of the Tides can prove to be a good move for boosting your dodge stats in a pinch; using it every once in a while between your main attacks of Burning Chi Fist and Dragon Kick will help further sustain a high dodge chance. -- The focus form of Martial Arts is Form of the Master, which grants stacks of focus when dodging enemy attacks. Its advantage, Storm Eye Prana enables you to recharge healing techniques faster. This enables you to do the same thing that was done using the Quarry Pistol Build; you can stack multiple Bountiful Chi Resurgences on top of one another for double dodge heals. - Unarmed Martial Arts is clearly meant to be built for defense, used in conjunction with the dodge mechanics described in the Dual Blades section. Lightning Reflexes is the standard for most Martial Arts characters, but it can get much more interesting than that. Since techniques such as Subtlety of Tides, Evasive Maneuvers, and Elusive Monk all contribute to stack dodge buffs, it can be beneficial to vary your defenses with a passive like Invulnerability or Regeneration. In the end, though, it comes down to whether you want to ensure you're almost always dodging, or prefer to have some sort of defenses when you can't. - Closely related to this, Parry is actually of little use to a Lightning Reflex martial artist. Power Armor's Laser Knight produces more effective results for the martial artist in cases like this, as it seems Elusive Monk is rather severely affected by diminishing returns. -With the advent of the Unarmed Pass, a new, offensive repertoire of MA moves has been opened up. Somebody remind me to type this up when I'm not half-asleep and can remember the names of the new moves. Shared Martial Arts  -There is a small selection of martial arts powers that aren't specific to any of the sets. Some of them are completely awful and you should never even consider taking (sneak, smoke bomb...) Others, however, are key to making some MA builds work much better. -- Thunderbolt Lunge is the main lunge that all these sets share, allowing the user to close in on targets very quickly. It doesn't stun like Mighty Leap or Void Shift does, but can do so if you take the advantage of Essence Assault. Lunges aren't completely necessary for melee characters, but serve as an easy and quick way to immediately get into melee range. -- While it might not seem like anything great at first glance. Inexorable Tides is probably one of the best interrupter powers for melee in the game, causing all enemies in front of you to be knocked up a short distance. You can even chain the attack 3 times in a row rapidly to attempt to deal fall damage to enemies, or space your strikes effectively to maximize enemy downtime. Thanks to the knockback mechanics, this can be used to quickly build up knock resistance stacks on enemies, making it a valuable resource for maximizing the damage from Knock-heavy sets like Might and Heavy Weapons. -- Shuriken Throw is the same deal as Inexorable Tides, except for a single target at extreme range with excellent energy efficiency. With fair energy, you can repeatedly throw shurikens at enemies from up to 100 feet away, and even potentially knock them down. Combined with other melee damage buffs, such as focus forms, Shuriken throw can do quite good dps if you build around it. Specifically, the basics behind a Shuriken build include Quarry, A focus form, and running in the brawler role. This combination will provide the maximal damage buff for your stars, and also is a good basis for using Gauntlet Chainsaw and Laser Sword as well! Bluhman fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Oct 31, 2011 |
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Jul 10, 2011 07:29
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Asimo posted:Hmm, does it actually work this way? I always assumed that the "does extra damage to knockback-immune targets" referred to things like Supervillains and Cosmics and such that couldn't ever be knocked back. If it applies to just resistance too, well... that's quite useful. Indeed it does. I've been able to get Haymaker taps to go from around 1300 damage to 2100 by using a combination of Demolish and Knockback resistance application. It's very easy to test and do on the Powerhouse dummies. checking again, the base damage of my Haymaker is around the 1300 range instead of 1600. Applying nothing but knock resistance will result in damage taps around the 1600 range; Just shows how much of a difference it makes! Bluhman fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Jul 10, 2011 |
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Jul 10, 2011 09:45
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Glad I can be of help!  Normally, I'm doing this in the order the power icons are listed on the top of the power choice menu when levelling. This means that the next logical step in the guide would be Telekinesis and Telepathy. However, Telekinesis is about to get a redux and I don't have a photo really set up for Telepathy either, So we'll skip that power pool and move on to the Bricks. In essence, they're very similar to the Martial Arts sets, but instead of having the chance to do major damage through criticals, they instead just use enrage mechanics to guarantee that damage. Heavy Weapon  - Heavy Weapon right now is a little ill-defined. The set's supposed to be built around increasing damage potential with the disorient debuff, but in practice the set comes out as a slower alternative to might which looks just as awesome. - The main thing that Heavy Weapon has over plain Might is that it can build and maintain enrage and energy very easily, and has excellent moves for taking care of big crowds. Skewer is probably the most notable of all the Area of Effect attacks that HW gets, as it can maintain and build enrage when hitting multiple enemies, and does quite good damage while at it, all while not disrupting enemy formation, so if multiple enemies survive your skewer, you can pull it off again. Skewer also gets cool advantages which change the damage distribution of the attack. Of the two, I'd actually recommend Follow Through as it causes the average damage of the attack in terms of DPS to go up. In addition, it doesn't require a full charge like the description says for enrage building; it seems to happen mostly if charged over half, but since the charge is so fast, it usually is a trivial difference. - Cleave is a very good choice for early-level builds, as it is very easy to get Enrage stacks with this attack. Once you get skewer and enrage, however, you'll most likely want to put this one away. - Eruption is actually a surprisingly good choice for early levels; it can be used to interrupt enemies, does fair damage, and builds knock resistance for your Annhilate attack. In addition, it's unique for being a recharge attack, so it will set off Molecular Self-Assembly once it recharges. - Heavy Weapon also has a good interruption power in Skullcrusher; when charged, it has a much higher chance of knocking targets down and building knock resistance on your enemies. Taps can also do it, but the chance to knock down and add resistance decreases with each successful application, unusually enough. Inexorable Tides is a better choice for a builder of knock resistance, but Skullcrusher does do slightly more damage. - The single-target big hitter that Heavy Weapons gets is Annihilate. Functionally, the move is quite similar to might's Haymaker, but has a slower animation (but not a slower charge) and will always knock back, even on tap. If you want to unleash damage with this attack on bosses or tougher enemies, it's imperative that they be resistant to the knock, as sending your target flying away is a bad way to lose the opportunity to land extra strikes with this attack. - The set is very good in solo PvE play, as it can hit close crowds with effective attacks. The set requires some careful positioning, as the most effective attacks like Skewer are actually cylinders instead of cones, making their area scope comparatively restrictive to other melee AoE's. Arc of Ruin can be a solution to this, but it hits for less damage than skewer and doesn't do anything for your enrage. It's advantage, No Quarter, is sort of like a multi-person version of Might's Demolish. Considering that demolish is used to wear the defenses down of major targets considerably, spreading this bonus among multiple targets is fairly pointless against weaker enemies. - In comparison, the set is awful in large-scale, teaming PvE, as its major AoE spheres and attacks have no synergy whatsoever with their native set at all. Brimstone + Aftershock can theoretically be used with Thermal Reverberation to gain extra energy, but Pyre is much more effective in many ways. - With a decent emphasis on knocks for single-target combat, Unstoppable can provide you with a steady stream of energy when unleashing Annihilate taps. On the other hand, most of the good Heavy Weapon AoE attacks don't do any knockdowns at all. If survivability in PvE is more of a concern, it can be an equally valid choice to take Defiance using this set. Might  - Might has incredible tools of destruction under its name. Home to some of the most ridiculous AoE attacks and deadly single target ones, Might has a lot of options for playing both offensively and defensively. If you can get past some of the annoyance of knocks, this set can be extremely rewarding. - One of the first attacks you'll want to take is Roomsweeper, which serves the staple of both building your enrage stacks, and hitting a bunch of enemies in a cone for damage while throwing them through the air. The advantage of this is that Roomsweeper does lots of damage for such an early attack, thanks to compound contact and fall damage. The problem is that it's not good for teaming situations at all, completely disrupting formations which would otherwise make a DPS nuker's job easy. If scattering enemies is a concern for you, you'll want to take Thunderclap to quickly stun all enemies in range of your Roomsweeper. Another, less reliable solution would be to take Roomsweeper's advantage: Concussive Blow. If you chain multiple Roomsweeper hits together, it can actually have the chance to juggle enemies vertically in the air while building enrage. - Mighty Leap in many ways is one of the best lunges available, coming out fast, and stunning your prime target when it connects at good range. Mighty Leap becomes a staple of this set, due to the tendency for it to throw all manner of enemies about. In addition, the stun it places on enemies will make it so that your Roomsweeper won't send that enemy flying backwards when you hit him. All enemies around him still will, but if your concern is single-target beatdown while building enrage, then this combo can be very useful. - Many of Might's Interrupters are built into the set itself. The most notable one for single targets, however, is Uppercut, which is a very fast, energy-efficient attack with decent damage. Whether charged or tapped, Uppercut will knock the enemy up into the air; maybe just a few inches, but it still applies the knock resistance. Because it constantly processes as a knock, Uppercut can become the staple attack of an offensive Might character using the passive Unstoppable, as each tap of Uppercut which connects will restore energy to you. Once the enemy is resistant to knocks, Uppercut will deal a fast and steady stream of damage that can easily be maintained. - Key to getting a lot of DPS out of tanks in this set is Demolish; a slow and powerful attack which reduces enemy damage resistance against Melee Physical damage. The move can consequentially be extremely useful to even Martial Arts or Bestial characters for this reason (but not to Force or ranged Munitions.) Its advantage, Below the Belt will place another Melee Crushing resistance debuff on the enemy on top of that, which can also be useful to characters that use that damage. An unusual quirk about Demolish is that it deals higher DPS when fully charged, as opposed to most attacks which use more energy and hit much faster and harder when tapped. - Especially for non-unstoppable characters, the default big-hitter for Might is Haymaker. Haymaker hits slower than uppercut, has a very long charge, does slightly more damage on tap, and doesn't knock enemies back on tap either. The burst damage from Haymaker is devastating on a full-charge, however, easily doing much more damage than full charge bursts from any other melee attack. Though not as damaging on tap as other single-target melee strikes, it can take advantage of knock resistance to be able to do more damage than most MA single target equivalents at an even lower energy cost. -Might team tanks get fairly good AoE attacks for their cause. Unusually enough, one of the better choices they get is Iron Cyclone + Vortex Technique as the attack can both draw enemies in towards the tank, help keep their enrage stacks up, and be fitted with Challenging Strikes to help increase enemy likelihood to target them. -Defensive Combo is a melee attack with the quirk of having a higher threat generation by default. Combined with Crippling Challenge, Defensive Combo is a surefire way to get a boss to attack you. it also helps build stacks of Defiance if you don't have them. By taking Surge of Strength, you only need to land a single hit of the combo to get the Defiance stack/refresh, and if you're lucky, landing 2 strikes of the Combo can build 2 stacks of defiance. Even better, these defensive bonuses can be overlapped on other defensive passives, therefore giving you about 1/3rd of defiance's full protection on top of whatever passive you might be using. In 1-player PvE and non-tank characters, though, the combo doesn't see much use. -Might tanks are almost always going to want to use Defiance, as it can provide the potential for the most defense against major damage bursts, alongside decent defense for large and rapid group attacks. Defiance plays directly into Enrage mechanics as well; when using enrage, the stacks will build faster if you have more defiance up. DPS uses Unstoppable for the same reasons described up in the Heavy Weapons section. Other  - This is similar to the 'shared' section of the Martial Arts discussion; the Brick classes include a couple of techniques shared by both Heavy Weapons and Might. -Enrage is an ability which grants a stacking bonus to all damage you do, making it versatile for any character, might-attacks or not, which make use of the superstat Strength. Enrage itself will grant up to 4 stacks of enrage when running 6 defiance stacks, and the recharge of the ability can be reduced by gaining higher Constitution or by brute-forcing it to lower times through Intelligence. If you have a strength level of around 120, it can be beneficial to perhaps invest in Enrage-based powers. --Enrage can be further augmented and maintained by using attacks such as Roomsweeper, Skewer, Cleave, or Iron Cyclone + Vortex Tech. One of the most straightforward solutions to the problem is to take Howl, which will inflict fear in all enemies around you and refresh or apply your enrage. The best way to get going in enrage stacks with Howl is to first use howl and follow it up with Enrage. If you don't have enough Con or Int to have enrage support itself, even with rank-ups, howl will help keep the balance. --Because of the click-and-recharge nature of enrage and howl, a great energy return option for Brick-based characters is Molecular Self-Assembly, which will be set off whenever your enrage ability has recharged fully. Combined with other abilities with recharge, such as Heavy Weapon's Eruption or Celestial's Conviction (which really is an excellent self-heal technique if you're not dodge-based), managing energy can be made much easier. -A key ability to helping the Brick melee sets is Aggressor, a toggle which increases all crushing damage you do by an impressive percentage. Knocks will create aggression stacks, which go up to 5 and increase your damage by up to 5% total at rank 1, and 15% at rank 3. This toggle can be used freely with enrage mechanics, but not MA focus mechanics. (edits for fact correcting) Bluhman fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jul 20, 2011 |
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Jul 11, 2011 01:32
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Aphrodite posted:Some of you guys have soloed Resistance on Elite, right? If you want to get the wings, my advice would be, if you have the time, run Resistance up to the sewers section on Very Hard or lower, and after you reach the sewers, log off for 5 minutes, switch difficulty back to Elite, and continue running. (and make sure you're actually on those difficulties when running, as the stupid difficulty bug might accidentally put you on Elite when you want Normal and vice versa.  )The more straightforward solution is to have a build with sniper capabilities. If you're far away enough and have a good angle, you can fire off a far-ranged shot at the control console to attempt to disable it. I'm pretty sure you have to do all the damage in your initial blast, though, or the mob nearby the console will activate, including the robot. The only console where this will not work is the one by the jet, as this console has a much longer activation range than any attack in the game. It can also be safely skipped, as you can send the bombing squad on that one off without you and they will successfully plant the bomb. Even then, the resistance wings are actually quite cheap nowadays in the auction house. I was able to buy a pair for around 15g.
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Jul 11, 2011 08:06
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Asimo posted:Also, I linked the guides you've done so far in the OP, Bluhman. Sure, the thread's only three pages so far, but I figure it'll be easier to have some direct links for people reading it later. Oh! Thanks, Asimo. Taking some of these powerset pictures has been a bit difficult. (but also some of the funnest things I've been doing nowadays with this game.  )Anyways, on to the Mysticism tree. Of all the trees, this one is the most expansive over all, with powersets capable of filling pretty much every role in the game, from ranged DPS, to strong tanks, to support healers, to even being flat out useless! Celestial  -At the heart of the set, Celestial characters are fitted to be a ranged DPS/healing mix. Lone celestial characters are decent, as the heals do give them some defenses, but honestly, the same effect can be achieved on normal DPS classes with a bit of self-heal powers. In addition, team healers probably will want to avoid Celestial heals, as they usually favor slow, maintainable heals over sudden bursts. - Healing with Celestial focuses around using Illumination + Brilliance, and Celestial Conduit. Celestial Conduit serves as the prime single-target attack for Celestials, but good luck dishing out any really strong dps with it. Instead, it serves to be used alongside illumination stacks so that it can heal close clusters of allies, or damage close clusters of enemies. The Brilliance advantage included with Illumination enables you to spread the effect very easily. - Iniquity is the Celestials express team heal, which you can use to very rapidly heal targets at a cost of some of your health. This is fine if you have health to spare, but if focusing on defenses and survivability for yourself is a focus, I'd recommend Psionic Healing as your burst heal; a full burst can bring an ally up to full very quickly. - The main problem about Celestial healers is that they both attract threat with their heals, and don't have good passive defenses to deal with them. Healing yourself won't really help this either, as any heal you do will draw some threat. This theoretically could be dealt with using techniques like Evasive Maneuvers + Sleight of Mind, but even then, the threat clearing isn't guaranteed, so you might find yourself with all threat restored to you once the stealth wears off. If you truly are seeking to create a healer that can rise to the challenge of a lair, I'd recommend taking a passive which boosts defense, with Aura of Radiant Protection being the prime candidate. -- Completely escaping my mind at the time of writing this was the panic button ability that Celestial has: Palliate + Absolve, which immediately clears all threat on the target. The ability also increases the targets presence, which when used on yourself, helps make your heals stronger. If one of your allies is in a rut from being attacked too much, this can sidetrack enemies while you use your heals. -Celestial has great options for cherrypicking powers, however, including one of the best self heals in Conviction. This heal recharges fast, and though it only restores a fairly low amount of health by default, it can be ranked up, and benefits greatly from critical stat combos (Dex/Ego), Presence, and Intelligence. If you take it alongside Molecular Self-Assembly, it will return energy to you whenever it is ready to be used again. -If you're a character with quite a bit of constitution and use burst-damage attacks, then Imbue will be another fine choice. Imbue will guarantee that the next ability you use hits as a critical with severity scaled off of your constitution. This means that not only can you make your attacks hit much harder, but also your heals, and when combined with a technique like Resurgence, you can get a bunch of health restoration in a pinch. - Seraphim might not be optimal for team healer situations, but for solo play, it does a pretty good job if you're focusing on doing Paranormal damage and also obtaining survivability via heals. The fact that it also helps in restoring energy also makes it a more sustainable alternative to the Paranormal offense passives. - One of the best active forms that you can get is inside Celestial in the form of Ascension; when activated, not only are your attacks made more potent, but also your heals. You also are capable of flying quickly when this is activated, enabling you to rise into the air after you've escaped a hold. Unlike other active offense/forms though, it doesn't do anything for energy efficiency, so don't spend the energy all in one place. Darkness  -Darkness comes out as a quite self-sufficient all-rounded thing, which, though it uses an offensive passive that implies DPS, has a skillset that reflects anything but. Instead, Darkness' strength lies in its ability to slow down enemies and keep them well controlled, while still doing quite good damage. Quite honestly, the playstyle of this set can be described as 'telepathy if it was actually done right'. -Darkness' prime area attack is Shadow Embrace, which sends a tight cone of tendrils out to repeatedly damage enemies. The damage from this attack isn't anything special, but it is extremely good for spreading the fear debuff, which is fairly key to Darkness' gameplay and triggering its energy return, Spirit Reverberation. Shadow Embrace has many versatile advantages available to it, namely Dark Displacement, which causes enemies to become repeatedly tossed in the air. The advantage also used to come with the functionality of Fatal Allure as well, but the real reason you wanted this advantage was to knock enemies down, not to draw them in. By sticking with Dark Displacement, you have a much lower chance of disrupting enemy formation. -For single targets, Darkness has access to Ebon Ruin, which can best be described as a dark version of Infernal's Defile. Ebon Ruin also has a very complex advantage layout, but the optimal combination you'll want to take to maximize its damage is Rank 3 with Nyctophobia -Ebon Rift + Vengeful Shadows basically is a move which basically creates a dark bomb that can draw nearby enemies in. Enemies in the center of the vortex will take extreme damage and knockback, as if they got hit by a Haymaker or something. The damage burst won't occur if the target is fully resistant to knocks, but they will take extra ticks of damage that add up. A fully-maintained rift will linger behind a lot longer than a partially maintained one. -A huge amount of damage and protection from this set comes from the Summon Shadows ability, which summons a trio of shadow pets. The pets hit in melee range rapidly, draw quite a bit of aggro, and have the uncanny distinction of having a buttload of health for pets, capable of taking a good few charge attacks with still health to spare. The advantage, Devouring Darkness, makes them even better for defense and restoration. If you're an offensive passive character who needs some protection, these guys can provide. -Grasping Shadows has the distinction of being an effective crowd stopper, allowing for a clearer setup for your other attacks. Grasping Shadows will serve as a good Alpha Strike for darkness characters, as it ensures that tightly-clustered mobs stay that way for your other area attacks. -Darkness has the quirk of having access to the strongest potential block in the game; Ebon Void + Voracious Darkness. With this advantage, Ebon Void acts like a block version of Defiance, building stacks of defense buff as you hold your block up longer. This buff doesn't increase your standard defense, but how much damage you mitigate while blocking. For team play, it can be invaluable if you want to wear out enemy attacks until you can get another team mate to take threat priority over them, and is otherwise a fairly decent tank block. -The standout lunge of Darkness, Void Shift has no synnergies with the set itself. Being a reskin of Mighty Leap that does dimensional damage, it can be utilized by Telekinesis melee fighters as an alternative lunge that can stun and benefits from their passive. On the flipside, its advantage, Emerging Nightmares, can be used to exploit the mechanics of the Burning Chi Fist/Spirit reverb combo and even Bestial's frenzy. Sorcery  -Sorcery is a fairly complex set of powers underneath one label, and includes four sub-classes: Arcane Sorcery, Primal Sorcery, Ebon Sorcery, and Radiant Sorcery. On a whole, Sorcerers are built to be damage-support characters on teams, buffing allies with their auras while throwing out magical attacks that have a variety of effects. Though there are differences between each school of magic, the staple moves for each remain the same. -Sorcerers early on will find their main source of damage and protection to come from Pillar of Poz a small, slow, but spammable explosion which knocks all enemies around you away. With the advantage of Dizzying Impact, you can disorient foes. If synergizing with the control mechanics of Telepathy by means of Telepathic Reverberation and Collective Will, the pillar can actually help buff these moves. -Primal Sorcerers get a special present for improving their damage output in the form of Invocation of Storm Calling. This maintain will repeatedly blow enemies away from you, and at the end of the maintain will cause lightning to strike all enemies in range. It also reduces enemy resistance to energy damage during the maintain, so it actually has potential to work with other energy attacks as well! -Late game sorcery yields a surprisingly potent cone attack in Skarn's Bane. Aside from doing a lot of maintained damage for a cone, it has application in PvP for removing energy forms and other buffs placed on enemies. Though this isn't a huge factor in PvE, the attack is still notable for its damage, outdoing most of the breath cones of other sets and even Shadow Embrace. -Each sorcery school has access to Sigils at rank 1. The sigils become a mainstay mechanic for most sorcerers, as they cover a wide area of the ground and sometimes have very drastic effects. --Sigils of Arcane Runes act as mines, exploding when enemies get nearby. Combined with a firesnake, the fire damage from this attack can be extremely potent. The recharge time is particularly annoying on these ones, though, as once they explode, you'll be without any sigil options for a good 15 seconds or so. These are best used with backup sigils. --Sigils of the Primal Storm provide a steady stream of electrical damage to any enemies nearby the sigils. They can do pretty deadly damage to groups if they're crowded near and inside them, and Storm Summoning can be a great way to herd enemies into the sigils, and cause them to do more damage. Because of their nature, they also tend to draw aggro to themselves, and sigils are fairly defenseless. Still, the Primal Sigils are a great choice for PvP against melee fighters. --Sigils of Ebon Weakness opt to wear down enemy attack power instead. In the center of the ring, the effects of each sigil all overlap, producing an incredible amount of damage debuff. These are very good sigils all around, and can be used to drastically improve survivability for close-ranged encounters. --Sigils of Radiant Sanctuary would be useful if they provided a sizable defense buff while you stood near them. Instead, they make you invisible.  -The sorcery trees also get unique Ritual pets. The pets, by default, are bound by a circle that you must stand inside for the pet to stay summoned. This disadvantage can be removed by taking Unbound Ritual, which, if you plan to take many pets to create a pet army, is very important. Otherwise, only one of these pets can be out at a time. --The Ritual of Arcane Summoning brings out a golem, which can tank for you fairly effectively. The big advantage of this pet is less that it can take lots of damage, but that it is effective at drawing aggro. The fact that pets can instantly be resummoned once they're down also helps, meaning if the golem dies, you can just bring another one out. --Ritual of Primal Summoning will summon an animal, which are sort of a combination of DPs at melee and range, as well as some survivability. They can be commanded to howl, which can give you an enrage buff, so if for some reason you're using enrage and want to be able to summon animals, this could do well. --Ritual of Ebon Summoning creates a ranged DPS demon. Fairly straightforward for damage support. --Ritual of Radiant Summoning summons an angel, which is the only pet of the four capable of healing. If you're constantly losing health, it'll almost never attack, and it tends to place some priority on healing you instead of others. However, its heal is slow, and once in a while, it tends to get left behind if it's been wounded and needs to heal itself. -Each class also gets a unique Circle they can summon to buff their stats. The circle can be summoned rapidly, but it's optimal for use only if you plan to stay in one spot. --Circle of Arcane Power will help manage your energy better and has the bonus of counting as an energy form. This makes it useful for setting off Force Cascades. --Circle of Primal Dominion Apparently changed from a grab-bag of weird buffs to a legitimate boost to damage resistance, combined with knock resistances and health regeneration. Since the knock resistance helps keep you in the ring, this circle can really help you stand your ground for a big fight. --Circle of Ebon Wrath increases how much damage you do, as well as making you generate less threat. If on a team, this circle can see some fair use if you're a ranged DPSer that doesn't want enemies to target you. The disadvantage of this circle is in soloing situations, when all threat is on you. In these cases, the problem of the circle debuffing your heals comes into play, cutting most heals such as conviction or psionic healing right in half. --Circle of Radiant Glory will revive you immediately if you die within the circle. My solution to that problem is not dying.  -Finally, the sorcery classes all differ in what Passive they can use. All are supportive auras, and prove to be powerful tools for team play. --Aura of Arcane Clarity is easily the worst of the four, just improving how well you and your allies handle energy. Unlike the other three, this has almost no use on a team. --Aura of Primal Majesty, as I stated in earlier posts, is completely broken in how it can be exploited. By taking certain superstats, it can be adjusted into anything from a ranged DPS unit with enrage stacks, to a melee combatant that lands critical hits way more often than should be allowed, and can generally be utilized for the heavily increased critical chance, knock resistance, health buff, recharge rates, and energy reserves the stat boosts all apply. Alongside quarry, AoPM is extremely versatile and usable in most situations, and a team of 5 AoPM's buffing one another quickly gets absurd. --Aura of Ebon Destruction, prior to quarry, was the solution for set-agnostic damage buff, providing a slight, generic damage buff to you and all allies nearby. Compared to the buffs you get with quarry, however, Ebon Destruction simply won't allow you to handle your recharges or criticals nearly as gracefully. --Aura of Radiant Protection is probably the choice aura for teaming, as the defensive buff it applies is quite critical to surviving the relentless blows of elite and tough enemies. Leave your healing buffs to the Presence stat alone and run this aura; people will love you for it. Bestial Supernatural  -Bestial is a fine counterpart to the other melee sets, acting like Might in having some enrage mechanics built into some attack advantages, and like Single Blade in having many techniques for building up and utilizing bleeds. On its own, Bestial can be a survivable and swift melee combatant. -Bestial's sole AoE attack is Frenzy, which hits enemies in a cone on each tap, and also helps to keep enrage running on combo completion. Especially if using howl, you'll want to take Fear Sense to get the most damage out of this attack as you can. The advantage also provides some very unusual possibilities for Bestial/Darkness synnergies. --If you just want a cone that can quickly deal out bleeds, it's best to use either Scything Blade or SMG Burst+Aggression. Note that Massacre will not benefit any more than usual from Swallowtail cut (That's not to say I've tried, though. )-The key combo for single-target slaying is Bite, followed by Massacre + Bloody Mess. Bite will place bleeding on your target, which is guaranteed to stack if fully charged. Following this up with the Massacre results in damage taps that do immense damage. The fact that Massacre can knock its target down makes it even better, and a great choice for control. Massacre might also benefit from the knock stacks in terms of damage, and the fact it charges so fast can really make the damage output of this combo skyrocket. The fact that Massacre doesn't consume Bleed stacks makes it even better, and you only need one bleed stack to get the full damage bonus, so slash away! --Speaking of Bite, its advantage, Furor Venom, makes it act to restore your enrage when an enemy is bleeding. The stun is just an added bonus that makes this a good choice for PvP. -For bestial builds which use enrage mechanics, the toggle of choice is Aspect of the Bestial. Aside from making your character look horrible, it basically is an Aggressor clone which gains its extra damage buffs for slashing damage instead of crushing, and builds the extra stacks via bleed application, making it a good choice if you're looking to create an enrage-based single-blade fighter for some strange reason. -Resurgence is a great way to suddenly restore a good portion of your health if your superstatting includes Con. Resurgence can also be critted, so if you have Imbue, you can further buff the healing capabilities of this move. It adds a special healing buff to Regeneration if used, but most characters without it can benefit from the burst heal this move supplies. -Both supernatural sets benefit greatly from Supernatural Power. In Bestial's case, this enables you to spam your Massacre when bottoming out on energy. Infernal Supernatural  -Whereas bestial was a sister set to Might and Single Blade, Infernal comes out as the sister set to Fire and Ice, doing the same damage type as those sets, and sharing similar DPS tasks as the Fire set, though mainly on a smaller scale. -The main reason Infernal is largely popular is for its single-target heavy hitter: Defile. Huge energy costs aside, Defile comes out as a self-reciprocating attack, which does major damage on hit as well as reducing the enemies' defense against toxic damage and their healing capabilities. Following it up with another defile will keep those debuffs constantly applied, meaning that each following defile blast after the first will do more damage to the target. The fire set can certainly benefit from what Defile has to bring to the table, but unfortunately, the opposite doesn't quite apply. -Fire damage doesn't quite apply too well to Infernal-based builds that use the infernal toggles and returns (Aspect of the Infernal, Supernatural Power, etc), as Fire attacks themselves are quite expensive in endurance, and mostly require their own mechanics to be used to their full potential. In addition, fire attacks actually won't benefit from the damage buff of the Infernal Aspect. The best that Infernal can supply for AoE is Vicious Cyclone and Venom Breath, which are functional equivalents to Might's Iron Cyclone and the elemental breaths of fire and ice, respectively. Not quite as powerful as conflagration, but they still can get the job done, thanks to the damage buffs that infernal's buffs supply. And Fire Snake of course. -Getting to Infernal's worthwhile passive abilities, we come to Aspect of the Infernal, which right off the bat looks way better than the Bestial Aspect. This move substantially increases toxic damage, and gets damage buffs when knocking enemies down, making it work in direct tandem with Vicious Cyclone's chance to knock enemies down. -The main benefit that infernal gets from Supernatural Power, in general, is of the same nature as bestial: Whereas bestial is capable of spamming Massacre using it, Infernal can continuously use Defile because of it. In addition, Venomous breath has a high chance of setting it off, and thus becomes a very sustainable AoE attack. -Melee cherrypickers will take special notice in the standout power of Devour Essence, which is a close-range version of Darkness' Life Drain, except a little less healing in exchange for way more damage. High in energy cost, it also benefits from supernatural power, and with critical chance, it has the capability to do immense damage. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Oct 31, 2011 |
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Jul 12, 2011 03:17
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Asimo posted:Note you'll probably want to de-activate your energy builder before using this, as it can and will eat the proc, at least last I checked. I actually really hate Imbue for that very reason. Asimo posted:Note quite true, as Venomous Breath is a "generic" supernatural power, so Bestial can take it was well without screwing up its power progression. As it's ranged and toxic damage however there's generally no real reason to since it almost certainly won't be getting a bonus from your passive buffs, although its range and cone may make it handy. It's weird; the venomous breath does appear under the attack choices if you select Bestial, but it has practically no synergy with the rest of the bestial set in the slightest. I guess I just count it as part of the Infernal set in my mind. V V
Bluhman fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Jul 12, 2011 |
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Jul 12, 2011 09:19
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The newest patch brings us a bug: Whenever you put away weapons, your character EXPLODES. Well, they make an explosion sound whenever putting weapons away. This has hilarious implications for griefing. EX: Walk into club caprice, repeatedly use lead tempest/sword cyclone/eye of the storm/brimstone and block to make a series of very loud explosion noises. EDIT: You can literally skip the middleman by just taking the Heavy Weapons Guard power; it will play the sound whenever you block rapidly. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jul 14, 2011 |
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Jul 13, 2011 14:52
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Asimo posted:I also wish eye beams didn't suffer the Power Armor Toggle Curse, since they're a pretty awesome and (I believe) unique SFX, in being the only powers that emanate from the eyes. It's arguably worse than the other power armor toggles too, since they're intentionally middling damage and no-cost in order to be stacked atop the other toggles, but that means they're pointless to use alone. You can make various energy builders and tier 0 blasts emanate from the eyes. It's no laser beam, though. After attempting to create a build centered around critical-hit eye-beams, I can safely say it's one of the most useless powers I've ever used. I mean, alone, my energy bulder does more damage than it.
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Jul 15, 2011 08:40
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I don't even know how that could be an issue; they literally just introduced more options on literally two of the same hideout maps. It really doesn't make sense that you wouldn't get extra lag when introducing 4 different map types that every character in the game can own, but in fact do get lag when adding a few options to two of them. Then again, this is cryptic I'm talking about here. V V
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Jul 22, 2011 05:26
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Aphrodite posted:They are, but some like Lightning Reflexes and PFF suck without some other stuff from their set. PFF sucks regardless of what you're using with it. The whole thing of 'set agnosticism' refers more to the distinction of Defensive passives just boosting your defense, no matter what, versus most Offensive passives, which boost usually only one damage classification type, so if your character isn't chiefly focused on throwing out a single damage school (elemental attack, energy attacks, physical attacks), an offensive passive probably won't benefit you much.
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Aug 4, 2011 09:03
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The only character I have in the Supergoons is Screamin' Eagle, which I guess will work alright, as soon as I transfer money over to him.
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Aug 30, 2011 19:17
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 How do you even glean 'formal wear' from that 2nd announcement.EDIT: Aphrodite posted:For a time it was: 
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Sep 3, 2011 23:45
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I got a few stray shots of what I really liked, as well as some proximity shots of other random winners. I have to say, though the designs are normal, the details are very nice, and the pubs overall delivered. The one on the right was Venutian... Something. Very nice use of the retro sci-fi motifs while straying to use other accessories than just full drat retro sets; just little things like miniskirts, and probably one of the better uses of a beehive I've seen. The guy on the far left won our category for mismatched names and costumes. His name was Boulder.  The woman on the left, I completely forget the name, also won a top rank. It's a pretty standard pulp uniform (though it could do with some pants), but the colors are actually really nice on it. The beast on the right was predictably named Yeti. It was alright, I guess, since I voted for it. V V I think this one had a lot of unanimous support from the goons. Another really good blend of new Sci-Fi parts and older pieces to put together a distinctive look. And a really good emblem choice, too. Light Gun Man posted:Here's the Iron Chef guy that some of us thought was pretty funny. Also you can see both the winner of "female made by a male", in "her" alternate outfit that covers "her" entire body yet is still fetish material, and the (name of) runner up for it in the back there.  The name Areala is literally one letter off from Areola( ??). I might be giving too much credit to say that was intentional.
Bluhman fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Sep 4, 2011 |
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Sep 4, 2011 10:31
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Technogeek posted:I think you originally described him as "Thor if he was a character from Fallout". That was just me blathering randomly. He really didn't look anything clone-like to me, so I took 2 things, one norse, the other not colorful. LordSaturn posted:I love that all the best uses for the bubblehead sphere involve not using it as a space helmet. I can get behind this.  
Bluhman fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Sep 4, 2011 |
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Sep 4, 2011 19:45
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delfin posted:Not really. The Blade technically counts as part of the Martial Arts family and can get a couple of the miscellaneous Martial Arts powers, but Dual Blades, Fighting Claws and Unarmed don't even have purchasable archetypes (yet). You'll need to go Gold and Freeform to really dig into those sets. Though keep in mind, Martial Arts is next up on the chopping block for power revisions. We might be seeing an MA AT soonish.
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Sep 8, 2011 21:39
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Benjamin Black posted:Wait what? How do you get into this DirectX 11 mode? It's in display options under the 'troubleshooting tab'; there's an option where you can choose what video driver to use with the game, and it's normally set to 'auto'. You can click on the menu to switch the game over to DX11 mode. When I tried running it, the game took forever to load, and LOD on far away terrain was buggy and 'foggy', so I turned it off. 
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Sep 9, 2011 09:35
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I'd say save that for the next one. We've already chosen what we should do for this round, and we also don't want to exactly wear out people with a ton of categories on the flipside.
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Sep 10, 2011 04:42
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It's lot less of an issue with super speed, in my experience. If you tap the jump button right (a very short tap) while running at full speed, you can make pretty high jumps. To give an idea, I can get up onto the short side of the RenCen awning from ground level using this technique. Burrowing, however, really needs something to augment it. Sure, it hides you, but it takes 4 seconds to activate, and you can't cover anything vertically at all.
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Sep 14, 2011 18:33
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According to Tumerboy, the designer behind the Penthouse and most of the hideouts, he wasn't even finished with it. He was planning to actually add in 2 more rooms, but had apparently gotten behind on working on the hideout's bathroom. Which is sort of ridiculous to think, actually, because this is easily the most spacious hideout yet, not even counting the outside area.
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Sep 16, 2011 19:42
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Light Gun Man posted:If that's a bug, they should roll with it and make an event out of it. Pretty sure that's what happens if you get out of the standard map bounds of the Penthouse. I heard of another person doing it and mentioning how the CHQ, RenCen, and all of west side are missing. Of course, I still am not sure myself on how to do it. I think I'll use... Avalon. I just realized my previous choice I had here was not in Supergoons.
Bluhman fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Sep 17, 2011 |
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Sep 17, 2011 08:30
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Aphrodite posted:So if we do another, I was thinking we combine the existing popular categories. I of course love this idea. Shorter category names also means we won't have to link to the forums constantly. Just make sure not to advertise like a week in advance. I don't think many people liked that. Hell, the standard's usually 3-2 hours in advance, and that gives plenty of time for contestants to tweak outfits. Or not tweak them as they horribly misconstrue our categories. 
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Sep 19, 2011 03:34
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Pet builds can murder almost everything in their path. However, due to aggro issues, they also tend to be forced into murdering everything in their path, so it can be easy to level, but it's also a bit slower.
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Sep 25, 2011 10:50
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Bruc posted:Which archetypes are decent at pvp? I played some at release and want to mess around with it again and liked pvp the most, but I have no idea what is any good anymore. Disciple: You kill single targets ridiculously fast, and can automatically heal when landing criticals with Siphoning Strikes. Especially in terms of how the roles of archtypes play out, Disciple actually is probably the most resembling of the classic Melee PVP build out of all of them. The build even includes a built-in hold. Behemoth can be very easy to play in PvP due to its defenses. Soldiers can use their smoke grenade to blind their enemies and land charged strikes with their sniper rifle and rocket launcher. Devastator's early access to moves which interrupt enemies make it quite powerful in early-game PvP, but late game, they'll be hurting for a method to keep themselves alive.
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Sep 26, 2011 22:13
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As far as I know, taking superstats which occupy the same upgrade type slot isn't that problematic. If you consider how many upgrade slots you can find your superstats in on secondary gear pieces, it's very possible to bleed out your stats over secondary slots instead of worrying too much about the primary stat boosts. Though looking at the charts, INT/END does seem to be one of the more restrictive combos. If you're still having energy problems, another possible power you can take to help energy issues would be Molecular Self-Assembly, which directly boosts energy generation whenever a recharge ends. Really, any INT character with at least 1 or 2 recharges they use regularly will find great benefit from the energy return.
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Sep 28, 2011 18:16
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Allatum posted:Taking numbers into account, Hundred Fists is about on par with Chainsaw (except it hits a wider area) and Ego Blade Frenzy (But hits less targets) I think Chainsaw can manage more damage outright, but Fists will do two hits every half second, which can do a lot of damage. Provided you're not running Elite and fighting a boss with defiant or invuln. Given how dodge chance works, Hundred Fists looks like it would completely rape most enemies on elite. Multiple hits in a single tick means that those hits are still going to do a lot of damage, even on dodge. In addition, hell, I'm almost certain hundred fists energy cost is substantially lower than that of chainsaw. The thing about Open Palm is that the tap ignores knock resist, so even on full-stacked knock resist, your enemy is going to repeatedly fall down until you run out of energy or they die. Considering how unstoppable has an energy return with knockback... Bluhman fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Oct 2, 2011 |
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Oct 2, 2011 09:25
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Cindare posted:So I picked this up recently. I'm playing with a friend of mine, and we are basically a duo setup with a Grimoire and a Behemoth. We're in our mid teens right now and I'm looking forward a bit on how to spend advantage points. - This is a tough one to answer, because with demolish, you don't really need either: Uppercut's used to knock enemies which are not resistant to knocks down, while Haymaker's use is the opposite, for dealing magnificent tap damage to those which are. Demolish, on the other hand, completely ignores the whole knock business altogether and just does really good damage. In either case, I'd take Uppercut, since it's the more manageable of the two in terms of knocking away. - Demolish is going to be your main source for single-target damage. Given that ranking probably isn't as crucial for anything except your main damage dealers, I'd recommend ranking Demolish up completely. - Skarn's bane is going to be the big attack you eventually get. Compared to other things like Eldritch Blast or Pillar of Poz, you are going to be using that attack the most of all in AoE battles, so get that ranked up! Sigils can also be a good option to rank up, but when the time comes that there isn't enough of an attack gap to summon them, Skarn's bane will the the go-to attack.
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Oct 4, 2011 07:56
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-Auras are your friend. Any of the auras from the Sorcery Tree work well for pets because they affect pets around you. Probably the most noteworthy ones are Aura of Radiant Protection and Aura of Ebon Destruction, which work as mini defensive and offensive passives, respectively, which also apply similar boosts to targets around you. The fabled Aura of Primal Majesty also can work; the pets do gain stat increases, but all that results in is a slight increase in survivability and damage, I feel. -Inertial Dampening Field provides extra protection for your pets. It's extremely good for typical PvE situations. -This is pure theory, but the more and more pets you get, the less and less useful healing pets become, as they get distracted by the lowering health of your other pets. Since pets are primarily disposable, this isn't a preferable thing, as you would want your pets to focus their healing powers on you. Healing Drones can be exempt from this if ranked to full, as their healing aura can hit a wide number of targets. -A note about Munitions Bots: Don't bother R3ing them, as all that does is increase their range. Almost always, you're going to be fighting your enemies at around 50 feet unless you're taking some very unusual attack pattern.
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Oct 6, 2011 21:30
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Sounds good, but what would Slutty Sexy be? Would it be replaced with Slutty Cute? 
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Oct 10, 2011 05:20
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Pretty sure the other is fly-flight, which turns you into a swarm of flies that can fly around.
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Oct 15, 2011 19:49
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Warning: There's a chance I might not actually be able to make the contest, as I just remembered I had a real-life Halloween party then. Sorry
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Oct 27, 2011 00:41
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I have now updated this post to talk about spec-trees as well as choices in superstats! Hooray. Now the new item system won't completely confuse everyone. About superstats: You get three of them; one primary, and two secondaries. Your primary stat grants you access to a specialization tree at level 10, which includes a lot of special choices that work to make your hero even stronger and focused.  STR - The de-facto stat for melee fighters. Strength causes your melee attacks to hit much harder (since the 20% damage boost cap doesn't exist anymore), makes you fly backwards less when knocked, makes your melee knocks more powerful, and allows you to pick up and throw heavier objects to disable enemies' travel powers.Spec tree review: Offense: Excellent Defense: OK Energy: Great Versatility: Poor Mastery: OK Strength is an awesome choice for a primary superstat if you're seeking to create a melee fighter. Aside from its baseline stat bonuses, it allows you to hit much harder with its spec tree's access to Aggression, boosting the amount of offense you get from items, Overpower, which allows your strength-stat to let you land melee criticals, and Brutality, which boosts the severity of your crits. On the defense, Juggernaut can be coupled with a secondary stat of Constitution to enable you to get a defense bonus alongside your expanded health. Physical Peak makes it much easier to handle extended melee combat. Its one downside is that, if you're planning to use ranged attacks, Strength's bonuses and spec tree probably won't offer a lot of support. Still, built right, a Strength-focus character can land attacks which crit a decent amount of the time, hit harder than most other alternatives, take a good beating, and keep a good pace up while doing all that. Take Strength as a primary if...
Notable scalings: Enrage, which boosts mostly melee damage based on your strength.  DEX - Dexterity can be considered the 'all around' stat, in all actuality. Dexterity's most noticeable effect is that it causes you to land criticals much more often, and also makes stealth moves a bit more effective.Spec tree review: Offense: Great Defense: Great Energy: Poor Versatility: Excellent Mastery: Excellent Dexterity's spec tree plays perfectly into Dexterity's playstyle most of the time. Gear Utilization makes you get more offense/defense stats from your items, which is always good. Dexterity can also translate offense directly into extra crit-chance using Combat Training, and can use Deadly Aim to make those criticals hit even harder. Dexterity can also serve as a great dodge-tank stat, as Quick Reflexes boost your dodge chance based directly on your DEX stat, while Evasion increases the damage reduction your dodges offer by the value of your secondary stats. Its biggest shortcoming is that its energy-return mechanic of Power Swell is highly situational, given that it is very hard to get critical chance above 45%, and ultimately doesn't pay off well for players who use lots of combos/maintains/taps. In any case, Dexterity is perhaps one of the most versatile spec trees overall. Take Dexterity as your primary if...
Notable scalings: Focus forms in the Martial Arts Tree will boost the damage offered by stacks, as well as the effectiveness of Rush from Dragon attacks. Boosts dodge-stat gain from Parry's Elusive Monk.  CON - Made purely for survivability, all constitution does as a superstat is boost your health value. If given a high enough score in this stat, though, you can have roughly twice as much health as other characters of your level. Even without a defensive passive, this gives your character a lot of buffer-space for not dying.Spec tree review: Offense: Poor Defense: Excellent Energy: Great Versatility: Great Mastery: OK The one thing to notice in Constitution's tree is that there are no direct boosts to your offense or offensive capabilities. This tree's all about resisting and surviving effects. That said, Armored will probably be your best friend in this tree, boosting the amount of defense you get from your items. Fuel My Fire is a really good choice for energy management if you don't take other on-hit energy mechanics such as Defiance or Force Shield. The rest of its specs are largely fitted to suit various other needs; I.E. taking Deflection is a great idea if you have a Dex secondary, while Resilient can be used to increase knock resistance if you don't have high Strength. Take Constitution as your primary stat if you want to make a super-solid tank, or just a character that can handle damage better than the rest. Take Constitution as your primary if...
Notable scalings: Increases healing gotten from Resurgence and Enrage's Endorphin Rush, and directly scales up resistance offered by Defiance. Scales up energy return from Spirit Reverberation.  INT - This largely-utility stat has some interesting effects. It increases the energy efficiency of all your powers, shortens your recharges, and allows you to see through certain stealth effects.Spec tree review: Offense: Great Defense: OK Energy: Great Versatility: OK Mastery: Poor Intelligence is weird. Its whole schtick is that it's tailored for creating a character who doesn't use their superstats, but all the stats on the board, as proved by its mastery, which boosts all your non-superstats by 20 points, and the specialization Enlightened, which bolsters the bonuses these non-superstats grant. Still, there are some nice perks to this tree, with Tactician allowing your superstats to boost up your offense rating. Tinkering increases your offense/defense yield from items, while Detect Vulnerability will give your attacks some defense-penetration, making you more valuable against bosses and armored enemies when those times come. Meanwhile, Expertise, the superstat variation of Enlightened, is actually pretty badass when you think about it, while Preparation, which increases your equilibrium based on your Endurance stat, is a really good way to render Recovery moot if you're an END superstatter. Finally, Revitalize can be used to make it so that you can use recharge abilities very rapidly if you time your energy builder hits correctly. Overall, though it's constructed mainly to build utility/control characters, it definitely has enough tools in it to make it useful for quite a bit more than that. Take Intelligence as your primary if...
Notable scalings: Energy Return from Molecular Self-Assembly and Overdrive; length of zombie summon from March of the Dead. Scales up damage gained from Concentration and bonuses from Manipulator. Affects Int+ and Ego+ bonuses from Quarry.  EGO - Ego has evolved from a highly dependent stat to a very solid stand-alone one. Ego is basically ranged Strength; it boosts your ranged damage and knock power, and increases your resistance to holds slightly. If you're not hurting for energy, this is the way to go if you're looking for Ranged DPS.Spec tree review: Offense: Excellent Defense: OK Energy: Great Versatility: OK Mastery: OK And when it comes to its spec tree, Ego delivers. On the offense-side, Aggression gives you a big offense-boost from items, while Force of Will gives you a bit of extra resiliency with your secondary superstats. The upper half of the spec tree includes a LOT of utilities great for making your character devastating when it comes to crits, with Follow Through, Sixth Sense, and Exploit Opening all great utilities. On the Energy Front, Insight will help a lot for keeping your attacks rolling, while mental endurance is a decent choice if you chose Recovery as a secondary superstat (for whatever reason). Because its mechanics largely aren't tied directly to melee attacks, it comes out an eke above Strength's tree in its versatility, but they overall come out functionally identical, and when you really think about it, Ego just isn't a good stat for a melee fighter. Still, for your ranged damage purposes, this is the tree and superstat to turn to. Take Ego as your primary if...
Notable scalings: Scales up damage gained from Concentration and Mental Discipline. Energy Return from Killer Instinct, Hunter's Instinct, and Ego Reverberation. Also scales up Ego Blade attacks much like Strength would for most other melee strikes.  PRE - Presence, at face value, is the healer stat. That said, it increases the strength of your heals and shields, as well as boosting the length of your holds. It also increases your "Crowd Control Resistance" which I have bumfuck idea of what that does. In any case, its boost to healing power essentially makes this stat all the worthwhile.Spec tree review: Offense: Excellent Defense: Great Energy: Poor Versatility: Great Mastery: Great Presence comes out on top with its spec-tree. Though mainly geared towards making strong healers and controllers, its versatility ultimately shines through, with Grandeur offering extra offense directly from your Presence, and Force of Will offering defense on your other superstats. Moment of Glory offers the extremely awesome bonus of extra critical-chance from your secondary superstats. Finally, Repurpose offers you extra defense in the form of slightly stronger heals from your offense score. That's four specializations that can work for pretty much any character type. Even then, the other specializations are good things to try and check out if you're seeking to make a support character. It's slight weakness is that it doesn't have a specialization which helps it out in energy (again, meant to play into the healer role and its heavily boosted energy reserves.) A weird thing to note; unlike most of the other trees, none of its offense/defense boosts depend on your equipment; purely your superstats. Theoretically, this is to allow it to tie into heavy usage of Sentinel jewels, which bolster healing power and crowd control over offense and defense, but all it ends up doing is making the spec tree a little more flexible overall. Take Presence as your primary if...
Notable scalings: Increases healing/damage boost from Compassion, and bonuses from Manipulator.  REC - Recovery is a superstat designed to make energy management easier. It does this by boosting your baseline resting point of your energy, or your equilibrium, as well as making your energy builder return more energy and your energy reserves a tiny amount larger. Thanks to its blase spec tree, it still is one of the worst choices for a superstat.Spec tree review: Offense: OK Defense: OK Energy: Great Versatility: OK Mastery: OK The big problem about Recovery is that there isn't anything which sets it a head above the rest. Sure, it's got Gear Utilization, which offers some good boosts to Offense/Defense yield from items, and Staying Power, which increases the max. energy boost from Rec, is sensible, but everything else in the tree is largely trash. It really is the jack-of-all-trades tree, which means it just doesn't do anything good. Sure, it gets the ability to regenerate from Rapid Recovery, and can use Well-Rounded to boost max health, but compared to what dedicated powers and some good equipment can do, that pretty much means nothing. Figure out what you want your character to really focus on, and pick the appropriate superstat instead of defaulting to Recovery. Take Recovery as your primary if...
Notable scalings: All energy returns to some degree scale with Recovery. Supernatural Power scales purely with it. Increases healing/damage boost from Compassion.  END - Recovery's big brother, Endurance will boost the size of your energy reserves. As I explained before, this also means that individual energy-builder hits are going to restore more energy to you, thanks to the percentage of a higher number being a larger value than the same percentage of a smaller number. I only honestly recommend choosing this as a primary superstat if you're CRAZY about energy.Spec tree review: Offense: Great Defense: OK Energy: Excellent Versatility: OK Mastery: Excellent This is because Endurance's tree is almost entirely gimmicks that are going to make you use your energy extremely well. The standards of basic versatility, such as Gear Utilization, are there to help you get extra boosts from your equipment, but its Power Overwhelming that allow Endurance to put up a good fight when it comes to offensive output. Readiness is a good way, once again, to render the REC stat completely moot, while Kickback can definitely give you some extra aid in helping you avoid relying on your energy builder for too much time. To top it all off, its mastery, which grants you extra energy based on various conditions in role, is ridiculous and probably is way too much energy return for any character. It's certainly's got a lot of stuff that helps you keep endurance-heavy builds running, but it just doesn't pack the same punch as stats like Ego or Presence, due to lack of crit bonuses. Still, a solid choice for a secondary superstat if you need a small boost of energy. Take Endurance as your primary if...
Notable scalings: The most energy returns gets help from this stat, including: Ionic reverberation, Overdrive, and Flame reverberation. Role Trees  AvengerOffense: Excellent Defense: None Support: None Mastery: Poor Versatility: OK The avenger tree is the ranged DPS tree. However, its specs also enable it to be generalized to AoE DPS, as the only things specifically 'ranged' in the Avenger spec-tree is its usage of blasts (which are useless anyway.) Its abilities are the most helpful to those who use wide-area maintained attacks, thanks to Round 'Em Up and Relentless Assault pretty much being the most worthwhile specializations in the tree (Especially Relentless Assault; your offense skyrockets when you use maintains). Avenger tree supports a little bit of extra crit dps in the form of its 'Ruthless' crit-severity bonus, and Anguish offering some bonus damage when you land criticals. Overall, a lot of Avenger's specializations are pretty situational or otherwise flat out useless (Can't Touch This comes to mind), and the tree overall lacks any bonuses that help out the core stats of your build. If you've got a solid basis in your statting, though, Avenger's perks allow you to hit very hard.  BrawlerOffense: Excellent Defense: None Support: None Mastery: OK Versatility: Poor Brawler tree is the melee companion to Avenger. Most of its higher-level specializations are combo/melee specific, meaning it's not nearly as versatile as Avenger is. Brawler shares a lot of its shortcomings with Avenger, with the same utter lack of generalized boosts and strangely specific bonuses. Still, Brawler can do pretty good on the offense, especially in a team. Glory of Battle will give you a major offense boost if you land enough AoE attacks, while Flanking and Finishing blow are both convenient for helping a team take down a big boss, specifically if a good tank is around. In general, though, brawler is probably my least favorite role-tree. At least its mastery, which causes your lunges to boost your next attack, is pretty neat sounding.  ProtectorOffense: None Defense: Excellent Support: OK Mastery: OK Versatility: OK Protector is crafted specifically for tanking, and it does a pretty good job of helping a good number of builds become more survivable. For one, Fortified Gear increases your defense-yield from items quite substantially (which can be utilized by another spec tree I'll describe later), while Defensive Expertise is good for keeping your active defenses up and ready at more times. If you're planning to be a dedicated tank, I strongly suggest taking a peek at Bulwark; its advantage works in a funny way, in that it causes you to generate threat if you run in the Hybrid role. Considering you get an extra boost to your healing power while running in Hybrid, as well as doing more damage and having more consistent energy, a Hybrid running with Bulwark is generally going to be a much more versatile tank than somebody just running in Tank role. In general, the tree is good if you're looking to just get some extra defense boosts or perks, but probably isn't a great choice if you're looking for a little more punch; Protector, sadly, doesn't do much for your critical capabilities.  SentinelOffense: Poor Defense: None Support: Excellent Mastery: Poor Versatility: OK Sentinel is the pure-healer/controller tree. Because I'm mostly building soloists/balanced fighters, this is one of my less-liked trees, but it is an awesome tool for making support characters. For one thing, most of the support-geared spec trees have auras, which grant you and your allies special bonuses. Sentinel Aura, the aura of this tree, is still probably one of the best ones, as it can be used to keep your allies alive fairly reliably, and also causes your compassion to stack if you're using it, making your aura and other heals even stronger. The other spotlight specializations of this tree would be Caregiver and Genesis; Caregiver is good for support healers, making your heals on allies stronger, while Genesis reduces the energy cost of your support powers. Most of the other specializations in the tree are fitted mostly for critical-based healers or mezzers, which really doesn't gel well with iniquity (a powerful heal that doesn't crit.) Tough to use, but has some great boons.  CommanderOffense: Great Defense: OK Support: Excellent Mastery: Excellent Versatility: None Commander is the odd-one out; unlike all the other trees, which tend to have hybridized counterparts, Commander stands on its own as the only pet-based tree. That said, it is amazing for its purpose. Depending on what you want to do with your pets, virtually every specialization in this tree has some use. Practically everything in this set directly bolster's your pets abilities, making them absolutely devastating in the right situations. However, if your build doesn't use more than one or two pets, focusing your strength on the Commander tree is probably a waste of time, because the more pets you have, the more apparent the bonuses of this tree will be.  GuardianOffense: Excellent Defense: Excellent Support: None Mastery: Poor Versatility: Great Guardian has a bit of a history. Though it's the name for the Tank/Ranged damage spec-tree, Guardian was earlier the name for the Hybrid role. That said, its spirit of versatility seems to have survived perfectly through the transition, because the Guardian tree is amazing for any character running solo. The general strategy for this tree is to take three ranks of Fortified Gear to get your defense up, then take The Best Defense on the second tier to basically turn your defense score into pure offense. Bam; suddenly, you're doing sizable DPS with a tank-based tree. If that wasn't enough, Guardian also comes with some severity-boosting specializations, AND also has access to Find the Mark, which has a chance to increase your ranged critical chance against enemies you hit. Overall, you'll come here for the amazing offense/defense boosts, and stay for the decent critical-hit boosts, and on-hit bonuses scattered through the rest of the tree.  WardenOffense: Excellent Defense: Excellent Support: None Mastery: Poor Versatility: OK Warden is the Melee/Tank spec tree. It's largely a mirror of Guardian, and retains a lot of what makes it great, including the Fortified Gear/Best Defense combo. It's a little less generalizable, though, as it lacks any skills that bolster its critical chances, instead exchanging them for small damage-boosts against debuffed targets. Still, it's got good tools for increasing damage output in retaliation to damage, and, when paired with Guardian, becomes one of the only ways to make a DPSer powerful enough to not rely on criticals to deal good damage. Basically a must-have for any melee fighter.  VindicatorOffense: Excellent Defense: Great Support: None Mastery: OK? Versatility: Great Vindicator (which amusingly is just a synonym for “Avenger”) is the general DPS tree. That said, it's much better than either Brawler or Avenger, thanks to its very simple approach to things; criticals. Vindicator's crit-severity buff, Merciless, is the highest of any of the role-trees in the game, capping out at 15% compared to the 10% buff gotten from Ruthless. To add to that, Vindicator tree is pretty much the only role-tree with any actual access to flat crit-chance buffs, in the form of Focused Strikes and Mass Destruction, which boost single-target and AoE critical-chances, respecitvely. Vindicator is a step above its constitutents in defense as well. It has access to Aggressive Stance, which scales up your defense based on your offense score slightly (which can turn into an amusing, diminishing-return fest of stat gains when combined with The Best Defense), Modified Gear, which boosts the offense-yield you get from items, and Rush of Battle, which causes you to slowly regain health whenever you kill enemies. Use DEX or toss some lucky gems on your items, and Vindicator's bonuses will easily shine through.  OverseerOffense: Good Defense: None Support: Good Mastery: OK Versatility: Poor Overseer is the ranged damage/support mix. Its aura, which only boosts ranged damage output, is pretty bad compared to the more general auras of the other support trees, but that aside, it is one of the better rounded trees. Its specs, namely Enhanced Gear, give a pretty good punch, and Conservation is actually a keen way to help your single-target damage game keep up the pace. If you're looking to make a DPS character who can give a small boost to their allies through manual healing and other auras, Overseer is a pretty good option. If you're looking for pure DPS or self-reliance, though, Overseer probably won't fit your bill.  ArbiterOffense: Good Defense: Poor Support: Good Mastery: Poor Versatility: Poor Arbiter is largely a mirror of Overseer for melee fighters. That said, it has a few techniques that it can use to heal itself through combat, some decent offense boosts, and a similarly strangely-specific aura. Basically, aside from a more bizarre specialization mastery based on combos (ugh), it's functionally identical to Overseer.  SentryOffense: None Defense: Good Support: Good Mastery: OK Versatility: Good Sentry is the Tank/Support tree. Its aura, accordingly, increases the defense of everyone around you like a miniature version of Aura of Radiant Protection; certainly a step-above the damage-class-specific boosts of Arbiter and Overseer auras. Meanwhile, Sentry also gets access to Fortified Gear, identical to that inside the Guardian, Warden, and Protector trees, and also gets plenty of utilities for getting energy and health back through heals and taking hits. Great idea if you're making a team tank that also happens to do some healing/control, but if you're mostly flying solo or making a dedicated, aggro-grabbing attack tank, you'll want one of the other tank trees. My general advice for Role Trees include:
Items Let's get the simple thing out of the way: Items are a bitch to find now. Not so much just finding items, mind you, but finding good items that fit your character. Mostly everything you get is either random drops, mission rewards (which sometimes lack decent slotting options) or randomized box rewards. Probably the best place to get fitting items is to search the Auction House for various item classes and browse until you find something that suits your fancy. Now for mods; mods are special items you can insert into slots to enhance your primary equipment in various ways. Mods have various ranks (1-10) determining how much of a boost they offer. Mods come generally in two super-categories, which can further be broken down into sub-categories based on what kind of bonus they offer and how they can be used. There's two different varieties of mods: Enhancements and Armoring
Gems and Cores Gems are used as early as level 15 on your primary items, and usually can be used on any item type. They are tied lightly to a crafting school, as you will only be able to get certain gems from certain crafting nodes. If you have enough Resources, though, it shouldn't be too hard to get any gem class you're looking for, and your crafting skill doesn't play a major role in making fusion of any specific gem type easier. Gems themselves are the main upgrade item for your equipment. There are five different classes of these gems in the game currently:
Cores Cores are basically downgraded gems. They can only be fitted onto one item type (offense/defense/utility) and otherwise work identically as any of the above gems. You usually don't find these in nodes. Instead, they're usually included in pre-slotted mission rewards. Bluhman fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Dec 20, 2012 |
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Oct 31, 2011 21:47
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sentrygun posted:Hahah, Cosmics aren't immune to the 1% teddy bear chance on that ray? I don't know how long it lasts (or if it even applies a debuff) but that seems like a weird oversight. Hardly an oversight: The debuff, though it prevents the target from attacking for roughly 10 seconds or so, also severely boosts their damage resistance, so you don't really get very good free-hits in.
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Nov 7, 2011 09:24
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