1661

What stats did you end up going? i’m regretting turning my int/con PA hero with invuln in to int/end with PFF. PFF is just broken beyond words now from what i can tell.

1662

Professor Perilous is still my highest level, at 12; munitions build with swinging travel.

Adeptus Mechanicus respecced to single blade/munitions; he currently uses a flaming axe and a sub-machinegun (closest I could get to a bolter) with rocket jump travel.

Covenant is a sorcery build with fire flight.

Otohime is a dual blade/ice build with teleport.

Nekomata, I tried to make a cross of Taokaka from BlazBlue and Nekomata from MegaTen; she’s claws with acrobatics.

Igneous is my newest, designed to look like a lava monster; he’s a fire build with tunneling. I need to level him up enough to get some sort of flaming aura thing for him. I’m thinking of switching his travel to ice slide, and coloring it red to try to simulate some sort of lava slide, but the concept of a lava monster bursting out of the ground is pretty cool with tunneling (too bad you can’t change the color). Also, fire breath works great for this character concept, but man does it drain endurance quickly.

1663

This is cool, but it’s barely working for me. When I click either of my two characters it says character not found.

1664

One of the things I’d encourage people to do is mess with random on their characters. You’ll get body proportions that you might not normally consider, I know I tend to gravitate toward the more realistic end for my characters for the final product, but after playing with random I got this…

Now just look at the proportions, I didn’t go through and cull the terrible costume pieces and settings, but it’s a very dynamic looking silhouette that I wouldn’t have likely considered at all normally. Edit: It’s hard to see but he has really big (long) feet that add to it too.

1665

Murbella, PFF? I’m not up on all the acronyms yet.

1666

Personal Force Field

1667

To be truly viable, the following fixes to Personal Force field (PFF) need to be made:
-it needs to work with blocking instead of taking the full damage even if you block for obvious reasons. it is the only defense that doesn’t work with blocking.
-it need to regenerate as fast as health outside combat otherwise it will simply be down for the 2nd group and not come back up without excessive downtime. This is a major problem for me.
-it needs to regenerate more in combat. A health buffer is nice, but once it is gone you’re as naked as a congressman bragging about eye patch underwear on a live mic. A high regeneration in combat would give it a nice flavor.
-It absolutely 100% needs to have its own visible health bar. It is unacceptable that cryptic didn’t take the time to implement this.

before i respecced to pff, invuln was giving me around 33% damage reduction and -10 damage with me super statting con, getting con from gear and not even thinking about str. Hopefully it will pay off in the end, but now respeccing from invuln makes me feel like i just bought hellgate london 2 and a lifetime elite sub for it.

1668

I was using the recommended INT/STR and I changed it to INT/CON. I haven’t done much playing since the change, but I can’t imagine going CON instead of STR being a bad choice. Invulnerability was resisting more damage from the test lasers with the INT/CON build than it was when I had a lot of STR. Strength just seems like a really wasted stat for Power Armor. The only thing I’ll miss is being able to lift and throw pretty much anything. :(

1669

the damage reduction % of invuln is based on con. Str scales the straight damage reduction number. Con is obviously better for invuln overall unless you’re fighting LOTS of very weak things.

1670

I totally read that description differently, but you’re right. I haven’t been looking at the descriptions too closely and as a result most of my characters are underpowered, but I make them work. Heh. :)

1671

I don’t know if it is related to this last patch or installing new ati radeon drivers via windows update (screw you ati for not caring enough about your older cards to make drivers that can install under vista 64 without extreme effort), but now i’m getting a windows doesn’t have enough memory and would like to shutdown some programs (gameclient) error every so often.

1672

Well, it mentions scaling off of strength first, which typically indicates that it’s more important. Here’s the description text:

* Reduces damage from incoming attacks by a set amount. This reduction scales with your Strength.
* After the initial damage reduction the damage if reduced further by a small percentage. This reduction scales with your Constitution.

Either way, that’s pretty much the only ability in the Power Armor set that STR actually has any effect on. Maybe Laser Sword for the melee damage, but it just seems like a weird stat to “recommend”.

1673

Constitution is clearly more important for Invulnerability, as Strength just doesn’t change the absolute initial reduction all that much.

On the other hand, I’ve read that at higher levels boosting your Strength really high can help prevent chain knockbacks, which a small to moderate amount doesn’t seem to do significantly. If true STR could be key, as getting bounced around is deadly.

1674

Constitution is also a double whammy. Not only does it increase your damage reduction (with invuln) but it also increases your health, significantly increasing your time to live.

ps i hate pff, although it does look kind of nice to see my power armor hero with the the purple force field flickering on

1675

I haven’t tried PFF in a while; what was changed to make it so bad?

1676

Well, like all defenses, it was significantly lowered in effectiveness, as was field surge. I guess it was just lowered to such a degree that it went from a shield to a health buffer.

Now it breaks easily even against henchmen and it regenerates INSANELY slow. The end result is significantly less survivability than either invuln or even lightning reflexes. Not to mention unlike those two other defenses, PFF basically requires field surge to be effective. You also have to wait for PFF to regenerate out of combat while obviously other defenses don’t have that problem.

1677

Just as an aside, the arcane defense circle thing works pretty well against the kind of boss who just stands there within ranged-attack distance pretending he can’t see you until you activate him by attacking or getting up close.

When I have that up, assuming I don’t get knocked back or otherwise removed from the radius, it’s like having a passive slot defense along with my passive slot electrical form dps boost, a very nice combination.

1678

I saw a nice looking angel today. They even had some sorcery type power which summoned an angel with the little pylon things as well. Almost made me think the celestial power set was out already. Sadly i didn’t think to take a screen shot.

1679

Somewhat related, a dumb article on microtransactions…

In the end, it all comes down to what makes that game fun for the end user. As more and more companies figure this out, more and more companies will segue into models that offer more bang for less buck.

That is not the purpose of micro transactions, certainly not in games which are triple dipping with microtransactions or leveraging the time and money someone has already given you into more money. I love it, she (he?) picks something that has been notorious for abuse (ATM, Credit surcharges) to defend microtransactions.

1680

RobotPants, Mordrak and I formed an all-animal team tonight (toad, fox, rat) and got in a few levels doing missions in the desert and then back in MC. As it turns out, if you have a team of three, you will have one particular phrase etched forever into your mind:

I’m goin’ for backup!

Or a faction-appropriate variation thereof. In nearly every fight one enemy would instantly split off and aggro a similar-sized group, effectively doubling the number we were fighting. It also meant a lot of dying. I suppose if we’d been level-appropriate for the missions (they were all we had to choose from) instead of everything being +3 to us it might have gone better.

As much as I love the knockback effects of the force powers, the density of enemies is such that it is more often a hindrance than a benefit. I often can’t position my character in a way to make the knockback useful without drawing more aggro. Kind of frustrating. I’m close to switching over to another character as my main.