1841

Ya, you can design your nemesis. What’s dumb is you can’t design the minions. They should really let you do that.

1842

I dont know what i did wrong, but fire seemed EXTREMELY underwhelming at level 8. Pyre was nice against groups i guess, but even 3 same level henchmen would bring me to around 25% life. I went with recovery/presence to use fire form which isn’t really optimal, but still… maybe tomorrow i’ll try dropping pyre for a different ability of that tier or maybe i’ll just play electric instead.

It certainly looks flashy though…


p.s. no tail so i am safe from the bingo board and yes that is 8 feet of demon muscle wielding fire based attacks instead of a more fitting melee power set.

1843

You could use electrify to get a tazery effect without him lugging out a bow.

1844

I thought about it some more, and it’s come down to:

Mighty Leap, which can take Crippling Challenge
Entangling Mesh, maybe w/ the snare upgrade
Toxic Nanites, (Atomic Fire!) w/ the snare upgrade
Flash Fire, w/ the snare upgrade

Still some testing to do, and I might take all of them eventually. I’m thinking something along the lines of leading off with Toxic Nanites + Flash Fire, Mighty Leap in to root, follow up with a full Pyre (if I can afford it…) to really get the energy generation going, and then go to town with Laser Sword (which also increases the Toxic and Fire DoT). Toss Entangling Mesh when Mighty Leap wears of, or if I need to start without a full battery.

Preliminary tests lead me to think you could pop off a couple thousand hitpoints pretty quickly this way (At level 17), but I worry that it’s a bit too elaborate, plus snares and roots are hard to test on the Power House dummies.

1845

I used the free respec on Bitesy, my level 20 Force character, to completely remake him as an archer. Hopefully I like archery better because it would take about 1,000 years to earn the resources to actually buy a full respec and switch yet again.

1846

Two archers!?!?! I’ve gotten so used to seeing Foxy as an archer, now you’re going to make me respec her into something else or roll a different animal. =P Nah, that’s cool. I hope you like archery better. I feel like I need to augment it with another set, but like it a lot.

1847

I’ve been trying out a pure Power Armor set through a new alt, Storm Saber:

Endurance seems to be the constant limitation, but Micro Munitions + Minigun + Automated Assault Wrist Bolter all at the same time is a pretty fun combo. Invulnerability also seems like a decent passive, although maybe it’s because I’m main-stating Con (Int is 2nd, and End is 3rd).

1848

Nice coloring, very sleek design. :)

1849

Yeah, endurance helps a ton and the discount from INT does as well. A lot of people seem to like the Automated Assault enhancement, but I just like Concussor Beam too much to use the Wrist Bolter in its place.

1850

Fire gets a lot more potent if you pick up fireball with unstable accelerant, which you can then use to chain into your DOTs. Unstable Accelerant makes all DOT effects do significantly more damage, which basically means all of your maintains. With heat wave, conflagration, and UA, I’m doing very respectable damage. Don’t even have fire form on this guy yet, as I’m waiting for ice form.

1851

how do you get up to that level though? Was the problem that i went with the default firestrike ability instead of getting the flame breath? I didn’t want to get the breath because supposedly it is completely replaced later on, but my fire character ended up being the weakest character i’ve made so far…

I’m likely converting my level 14 formerly tk hero in to lightning anyway though.

1852

Well, it’s only level 11. I did spec out of my default firestrike ability, and replaced it with heat wave - heat wave is a pretty tasty single target damage dealer.

1853

then the question is do i respec my 14 to fire or lightning. this i will have to think about quite a bit.

1854

I was thinking of replacing Power Gauntlet with Concussor Beam, but when I tried Concussor Beam it seemed to drain end too quickly and for less damage than a charged PG. So I stuck with PG for the early levels, then picked up Micro Munitions, which I love, then Minigun. At this point, there wasn’t much use in charging up the Power Gauntlet attack instead of group attacking with all my weapons, and it would cost too much to respec it out for Concussor Beam, so instead I added Automated Assault to the Wrist Bolters as a no-End-cost hand slot for the group attack that would continue to replenish End once I was too low for the other attacks to continue.

1855

I use firestrike on Shadowfire. It’s not particularly strong but it’s spammable instant damage when I’m feeling particularly brainless. Plus I’m going to spec it with accelerated metabolism which should make it relatively endurance neutral/positive (it’s already almost end neutral). It’d be a lot better if I was dex/ego build for big burst crits, but the animation also feels right for the character which is the primary reason I took it. Heh.

So I’m messing around with the healing spells and empathetic healing really needs a chance to resist interrupt rather than an auto interrupt, maybe with a greater resistance to interrupts that scales with recovery? Seriously, it’s just not conducive to the chaotic combat that they supposedly want to foster. The arcane vitality is a little better but you end up spinning in circles not sure if you’re healing all that effectively (again because of the combat fosters movement). The charge heal I haven’t really tried yet. At full tap it’s a nice big heal, but not great for emergencies. The life drain bonus heal doesn’t seem to be great. They have to be really close it seems and the %chance seems to be on cast not on tic of the drain. It’s very, very inconsistent and possibly bugged.

1856

If I need quickly spammable damage, Fireball can be used as a tap, instead of a charge.

1857

Well, I’m not here proclaiming the awesomeness of firestrike, just how I use it and how I could see it being useful on a damage spec. I haven’t seen the animation/graphic for fireball, but maybe it’d work for my character concept. I’ll check it out, but I’d expect that the damage to end ratio of firestrike would be better on a single target than a quick tap of fireball. Of course, that’s assuming things are balanced.

1858

What power did you get at level 8 for fire? Due to the huge amount of hype surrounding pyre, i got it asap and was very underwhelmed. killing 3 same level henchmen with it left me at 25% 'ish life, an unacceptable result at level 8.

1859

I’m a darkness/fire/sorcery build Murbella. I’m not sure what I got at level 8, but my two fire spells so far firestrike and conflag. I plan on getting the targeted pyre skill later though. Fire strike has an advantage that adds a dot aoe sometimes, which might be useful with the fireball added.

Basically I open on a pack with grasping shadows (aoe hold with a dot advantage), throw a few shadow bolts, and the conflag them down. That’ll usually kill all the henchmen and leave villains at half health (masters at about a 2/3rds of their health). I like it, but it’s no where near the awesome killing power of sonic device + grenade I saw Jasper using heh.

Though, without the aoe hold, conflag wouldn’t be as useful since it’s interruptable.

1860

I’m mostly Shadow/Sorcery and if you use shadow form, and have a nice pile of Endurance and a respectable amount of recovery, you can kill all henchman with one Embrace button hold. What I don’t like about the powers is there is no real burst damage. However Circle of Dominion + Embrace and ebon rift, and you are a pretty lethal turret in PvP as well =)

EDIT: Forgot to mention I was 39, in the mid 20’s I went Int instead of Endurance, and that was a bad choice. With a good amount of endurance, my Damage multiplier in Shadow form is like 42%…