1621

Good point. I was thinking at Level 10 I couldn’t do that and get both Regeneration and Tazer Arrow, but since I took the tier 0 Sonic Arrow anyway…

As for hovering off the ground, I don’t quite follow how that protects you, as most of the guys I sliced could hover. What stops foes from flying up to you, yanking you down with Shurikens, using Thunderbolt Lunge, etc.?

Sonic arrow is great for PVE, it’s one the best energy->damage skills, it’s decent for pvp but with the huge charge time it’s a waste.

It costs much more energy when charged, as of today’s patch. I wouldn’t say it was a waste when you can make use of the AoE upgrade, but yeah, I’d rather have something else for single targets. That’s a long time to sit in one place.

the OP build is Taser arrow + icewall(advantage with the icewalk), you do 30% with 1 strike with your melee, he kills you in 1 icewall, you start off with taser arrow, run up, icewall, another taser arrow, which basically wins you the fight.

I was thinking that if you went to 20 you’d work in either that, or Mini Mines. Don’t you have to Shatter the Ice Walls to get that to work though? I thought the Tazer hold wasn’t long enough for them to go off alone.

Anyway, it sounds more like Ice shattering is overpowered, which from the small bit of level 20 PvP I’ve seen seems quite true. This is partly why I’ve been sticking to level 10 PvP…

regeneration isn’t OP for PVP, lightning reflex is much better than regeneration, most of the PVP is about alpha strike, regeneration will not keep you alive when a dual ends in 10 seconds, ice burst becomes extremely powerful later on, AA with ice prison, so your primary target is frozen in place while everyone else take a whoop 1400 damage on a crit and then falls for another 1000.

I’ve been curious to see whether Lightning Reflexes pays off at higher levels when bigger attacks are more prevalent, although you’re the only one I’ve seen suggest it. Regeneration with something like Master Dodge and/or Unbreakable seems like it’d work too.

Late games, you take Retaliation as your block move, and after you icewall, just sit there and block, if anyone attacks you, then whomever getting hit by icewall takes 40% more damage.

But late game there’ll be foes left and right who’ve taken Crippling Challenge or just vanilla knockback powers, so you can’t block, and most won’t sit in range of the Ice Wall while attacking anyway.

1622

Nice costumes, Jasper!

1623

So, wow, they have a pretty detailed armory character database system in the process of going up… it doesn’t quite work fully yet as evidenced by this screenshot.

Three have no image and two of the characters displayed aren’t mine but probably share the same names, Demonica and Dash. Clicking through to the character will give you a list of completed quests, current quests, inventories, powers, a picture and posing options. For the two misdisplayed images, when I click them, it seems to link to the right characters (but with a big N/A for the image).

1624

Yep, it’s nice because that’s how he looks almost all of the time when I’m out and about. And it’s not pink, it’s purple!

So far he’s doing fairly good, Snips armory link instead.

1625

Yeah, I really like the Ifrit. That one is very nice.

1626

Icewall isn’t ice burst, ice wall is a t1 skill which you can get below lvl 10.

You need advantage so you can get Ice walk, basically it turns from a range root into a PBAOE root that last around 10 seconds, you deal overwhelming damage every second, like around lvl 30, every tick I crit for 1200 damages,

Taser arrow is OP because it let player setup those combos like Mini-mine or icewall, since it last so long it’s extremely easy to re-apply the taser arrow before it wears off, as long as the player doesn’t break out of the taser arrow, then the hold protection will not go into effect.

Hover boot is awesome simply no one goes for the flying players, even if they knock you down, you can just go into teleport, and most of the flying players doesn’t go for skills like hurl or thunderbolt lunge, since they can already reach most the players, but one of the weakness of teleport is that you can’t sit in mid air and snipe, but strength of the teleport is that teleport doesn’t slow down in combat, so while flier are slowed you aren’t.

Lightning reflex is built to handle big attacks, it’s weak vs rapid small attacks, also blocking in late game is still viable, since block increase your knockback resistance, and crippling challenge skills will remove block but will still trigger your retaliation which boost your next attack by 40% more damage.

1627

nice, the last patch broke showing names above heads. Great job cryptic QA!

1628

Cryptic doesn’t need QA, they got people paying them money to test their games.

1629

Thanks! That means a lot, coming from an artist. While I’m at it, a few more!

First, a much improved Tunguska. Trying to stick with a flat Cloth and Dull Metal Soviet theme ruled out lots of parts, and I still had to take leather on a few pieces. Funny that the “Art Deco” crest was one of the few non-shiny ones; it bugged me at first, but it’s growing on me. Obviously there’s some sort of radio antenna in there.

Comrade Clutch! I have come for you!

Ice Shard. Still not happy with the gloves; the Tribal Ones I wanted were too shiny. :-(

1630

I would love to know the inside scoop to this. Who in their right mind decided that it would be OK to do almost all of the power balancing post-headstart? And PvE and PvP, both independently and against each other. Its not like they weren’t given all this feedback in beta, even with the limited play time.

Its like some executive decided to start reading spreadsheets they just ignored until a month ago and then decided to release anyway. The core of a great game is in there, I think. It just seems like they fundamentally can’t decide what they want it to be. Or more properly, have decided to change that at the last minute.

1631

If you modify lots of things that cause players to frequently have to change their characters and relearn aspects during the free preview it might cause them not to pre-order.

1632

yes, it’s better to fuck them over after they paid already.

1633

Of course, it is a win-win situation. You already have their money (some even paying around 14 months worth of monthly fees up front) and if they quit, server costs go down. you can’t lose!

1634

Dev Chat log was posted:

-they dodged the question of why they made all of the game changing changes after release.
-they AGAIN dodged the issue of respec costs and respecs in general
-they again said they want us to be able to see weapon designs in the costume designer, but no details or eta, still sounds like it is a “oh that is cool, but not a priority” thing.
-said they’re focusing on balance and fixing content gaps. balance thing has me concerned of course. content gaps being fixed would be nice. they said we should exp more quests in the next couple weeks or so.
-new costume items coming with bloodmoon. new costume items are always cool! yay!
-looking at the idea of being able to respec things in any order, but not any time soon

Memorable quotes:

[19:13] <~COquestionbot> <CapnGeiger> Question: Is Hellgate: London openly discussed around the office? Or do you guys awkwardly go silent whenever Roeper walks in a room?

[19:14] <@cryptic_chronomancer> First of all, you can at LEAST spell my name right. I mean - come on!
[19:15] <@cryptic_chronomancer> Secondly, everyone here has successes and failures in their background, and we learn a lot from all of it.
[19:15] <@cryptic_chronomancer> I love working with this team, and I’m looking forward to doing so for a long time.
[19:16] <@Cryptic_AntiProton> Hellgate London was an interesting game, it definitely had some stuff we could learn from. Also, we love making fun of Bill.

Hellgated!

[19:19] <~COquestionbot> <Per_Ignim> Question: Is it intended that a full retcon cost more than 50 times as much as it is reasonable to expect a character to have at any given level?

[19:19] <@Cryptic_Balseraph> Retconning and the Economy: First, there isn’t enough money flowing into the game right now. This is a completely known issue, and we have several different options that we’re testing. Basically, yes, we knowingly erred on the side of a too restrictive money supply to see what trends happened, and be able to catch issues (like dupe bugs) very quickly. Now
[19:19] <@Cryptic_Balseraph> we’re getting ready to make some significant changes to drop rates of items and resources from critters… and all of them are basically going to be “more”. =) The question, of course, is how much more; since neither we nor you wants the economy to be something that changes several times. For retcons in specific, I think that the cost scaling when you go deep
[19:20] <@Cryptic_Balseraph> might be found to be too high even after we’ve inflated the economy to where we want it to be. If so, well, we’ll change it. Easy. The current balance goal is that all of the money you earn in a SINGLE level should allow you to retcon back FIVE steps.

nice 1 level’s farming should let you respec the last 5 picks. screw you cryptic!

19:31] <~COquestionbot> <Feigr> Question: Are there any plans to add a gray scale the palette for powers?

[19:32] <@cryptic_chronomancer> We’re looking into the potential technical issue behind this (hues vs tints) but we have heard your desires and are working to make it happen! I know I’d use it to make a noir munitions character.

YARRR best news in the entire dev chat!

1635

What’s the deal with limited betas anyway? I figure it saves money… but you’re going to have to get used to maintaining servers 24/7 anyway and the less limited it is the more people can test, play, and give feedback.

1636

My opinion has always been the problem was cryptic used the beta not as a beta but as a preview to sell the game to people so they would preorder. This would explain why they were hesitant to make any major changes that might affect preorder rates.

1637

I think Rhino is referring to the closed beta, for example, only keeping the server up Tuesdays, from 12-8 or something like that. The closed beta had an NDA also, which would be of no use for building up pre-orders.

1638

Hilarious. I ran the sinsister area a number of times trying to get the gatling pistol on my munitions hero, as well as killing a bunch of guys in the town and nothing. After questing for about 10 minutes on my power armor hero the gun drops, happy.

Power armor is fun, but PFF was just gutted. I wanted to be int/end primarily for defense, but PFF just seems broken.

1639

Ding level 23. I’m realizing now how the level progression system is messed up.

The problem is I got the last electrical power I care about at level 14 or something like that. About 95% of the other powers are infeasible because they either use a slot I already have something better in, or because they have minor useless effects compared to my existing powers. The few remaining powers I might want are nice to have – minor buffs, self-heal, smoke bomb threat erasure – but they will not substantially improve my character or change my play for the next 17 levels.

This just seems dumb to me. It’s true that CoH gave you a key characteristic power at mid-level, but there was a more powerful characteristic power available later on. As an electrical type, I got gigabolt a long time ago, and there is no damage power in the game that is better, much less one that’s in the framework.

1640

hmm my gun hasn’t arrived in the mail yet, starting to worry…