A few jot-thoughts from running Hype last night:
1. No resistance changes — my best numbers without Tough (not counting Fire) are around 65% — with 4 slots in Tough, which I already had, I’m at the Resistance Cap on Smash/Lethal. Density Increase from Syn caps my Energy Resistance. Negative at 65%. Cold and Toxic ~20%. No psi resistance. Nothing to see here, move along.
2. Saw some issues when (purposely, as a test) taking on large groups of mobs. ~10 guys or so, I started to see a guy or two who just wanted to straggle back and who wandered off easily. That was annoying, but not untenable — more work for me, but it just means I have to actually pay attention a little more.
3. Burn: (certainly my ‘big gun’ for a long time, before Syn got Fulcrum Shift). Base Burn damage was cut by 25%. Recharge rate increased to 450%. AND any mobs in it (except for Rikti drones and the little Nem bots) try to run the instant you drop it. This is a little annoying.
Between the initial drop in damage, the two damage SO’s I had to drop to put in Recharge SO’s, and the fact that the thing is still about twice as slow to recharge as it was, the damage output from the power dropped to about 26% of i4 numbers.
And honestly? That would have been almost fair… it was overpowered… except the fear effect makes the whole thing more difficult to manage by a factor of about 100. I cannot FATHOM how any Fire/* tank other than */Ice, with Ice Patch, could even use the thing anymore.
4. PBAoE’s. I kinda do a lot of em. Never thought about it before, but I do: As PBAoE Melee attacks, they SHOULD all be hitting 10 targets.
Except I’m not sure that’s true. Ice Patch APPEARS to only be making 5 guys fall down at once. If true, that’s pretty annoying, as one of the best defenses Hype has is keeping guys from attacking, controller-style, and I can’t think why it wouldn’t be rated as a PBAoE. I’m half-tempted to get the PBAoE sleep power that no one ever gets, just to take a bunch of guys out of the fight, but Blazing Aura (PBAoE Fire DoT) will just wake them back up, so there’s no point, I think. Hmm. (I wanna be a 10-target Contranker, dammit!)
5. Weave sucks. Six-slotted weave dropped from 42% defense to 6.8%. Utter crap. Utter. Crap.
6. They’re spreading out the groups of mobs more. We did a couple Nem missions and didn’t see any “Class of ’05” clumps you normally see. I’d like to get a six-person team into a Nem mission to see what the group sizes are. They’re easily one of the ‘big groups, tight clumps’ types of baddies.
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All of these issues are kind of minor in the big picture: Syn and Hype ran six missions last night: Council, CoT, Crey, two Nemesis, and Carnies. We’re still on Invincible. ((Which they say shouldn’t even be entirely possible for a duo in i5. Whatever.))
The Council and CoT were Heroic, because we forgot to reset our dial. I noticed the CoT Earth guys aren’t stacking Quicksand anymore. That’s cool.
The Crey, Nem missions, and Carnies were all done on Invincible with no real problems: the second Nem mission caused the typical AoE problems for Syn one time and the Purple Fake Nem had no problem hitting her with his staff twice (OW!) while I was distracted.
The Dark Ring Mistress in the Carnie mission almost got Hype before I remembered to use a bunch of Lucks, but that isn’t i5.
We had to work a little harder on the purples — but everything still died. At level 40, we got close to three bars of xp with 2 heroic and 4 Invincible missions.
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The increased exp pay-out I think is going to annoy me when my lower levels alts get up into the ranges with five and six story-arcs to do.
My blaster experiences so far post-I5…
Energy / Energy – Nova kind of is a pain now. Before I could Nova and with Conserve Power, Stamina and a Recovery Aura / Speed Boost / Accelerated Metabolism be back in the fight about 3 seconds later as some endurance came back. Now, nothing. The crash really is a crash and definately is going to have me a lot slower to use it since it makes me useless for a while.
Ice / Ice – Gyah.. My hold.. My poor hold.. Have to slot it with recharge now to be able to perma-hold something since it appears to wear off faster then it recovers.
Blasters in general – I still don’t get what the point of Defiance is… Maybe if I went somewhere dangerous, got beaten to near death, and then went to hunt grey cons that couldn’t hurt me I could get some use out of it…
Oddly enough, all I did last night was work my two newest toons, my Rad/Elec ‘fender and my brand-spanking-new Archery/Energy blaster. (I was going to go TA/A ‘fender like I did on Test, but then I read some disheartening things about the final tweaks to TA before it went live. Bah.)
I’m really saddened to hear about the ice/ice blaster problem in the above comment, as my Arctic Ant just rolled through the mid-20s and suddenly became a helluva lot of fun to play… but a lot of his utility consists of FR and BFR. If those aren’t going to be worth a helluva lot, then I’ve got some thinking to do.
Doyce, the news about Weave is really unhappy-making. Bah. I may have to reroll my MA/SR as… gods, I dunno, anything else?
The only real irony is that about four days before i5 came out, I force myself to use my free respec, so I wouldn’t lose it (not knowing that they would give us a day to mess with stuff before handing out the new one).
What did I do?
– Well, I dropped Greater Ice Sword, cuz I just didn’t feel like I needed another attack.
– I picked up Weave, becuase it was about the only thing I could pick up that wasn’t just a different attack to replace GIS.
Now…
– Burn is slow enough that it’s no longer really in my attack-cycle in any realistic way, so I have a ‘spot’ open for another attack.
– Weave sucks.
So…
– I’ll be using the i5 free-spec to… put everything back the way it was.
Actually, what I ended up doing was dropping weave and picking up Hasten. Didn’t intend to have Hasten on Hype, and I’m sure that if I were starting from level one with him today, I’d be getting it sooner in the build, but what I managed to do was pick it up at level 38 and still get it perma by the level he is right now.
So, the good: With Hasten on, solo, I can get about the same performance as I could two days ago with Syn’s speed boost.
Of course I never solo, so with the two recharges in, Hasten, and Syn’s speed boost, I’ve got the 45 recharge time down to 14 seconds (for a net 50% reduction in damage — very doable). Ice Patch, which was never a problem to begin with, just get’s more effective, since I can actually get two down at once and spread the love around. All my other attacks are (obviously) cycling faster, which actually took some getting used to, but not too long.
The Bad: Aggro management.
1. Burn’s back up to very close to it’s old recharge times, but with a heightened fear effect, so the baddies keep running away about 30 feet and then running back, which means they might pick up a new target.
2. I REALLY don’t think Ice patch is making ten guys fall down (only five), even though it’s a PBAoE.
3. Taunt and punchvoke only hit 5 guys per instance.
= Aggro issues. A LOT more running around to hold aggro.
I think aggro management is an area where Invul/* tankers are going to do better than Fire/* because Invincibility aggros better than Flaming Aura.
Flaming Aura: Might hit 10 guys in a PBAoE, .should. aggro the one’s it hits and also five around each guy, like a punchvoke, but seems to just be aggroing those hit. The aggro attack throws about once every 3 to 5 seconds.
Invince: From what I’ve seen on Gilly, a bigger area of effect than FA, affects hits up to 14 guys, affects them continually, and has no miss-chance.
We’re doing the Eden Trial tonight. More than the five people we had last time, which means bigger groups of baddies, which means more stuff to keep track of. Hype’s the only tank.
It will be veddy interesting.