Over vent last night, a few guildies and I were discussing how important it is to select a passive defense for your character as either their third or fourth power — otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for massive amounts of Death and Defeat. In educating a fellow blogger who will remain nameless but who is otherwise completely awesome, we stressed that he might want to pick a defense power that ties in with his primary stats. What many people don’t know is that several of the defenses are boosted by various stats, and if your character is already specializing in one of those stats, you might as well pick the corresponding defensive power. So what would these be?
- Invulnerability (from Power Armor set): This shaves off a certain amount of damage from ever hitting you in the first place. Boosted by strength and constitution.
- Lightning Reflexes (any Martial Arts set): Helps you dodge and avoid a certain % of attacks, and is boosted by dexterity.
- Regeneration (from Supernatural set): Continuous self-heal, boosted by recovery and constitution.
- Personal Force Field (from Force set): Makes enemies burn through your force shield HP (which is largely unseen) before ever touching your HP. Boosted by endurance and ego.
- Defiance (from Might set): Every time you get hit, you stack up defiance (up to 6x), which boosts your damage resistance. Boosted by constitution.
Remember, if you’ve picked a custom framework (and there is NO reason you shouldn’t have), then you can dip into other sets quite easily. Do your homework, and you could be hitting two birds with one stone here. If you want a longer explanation, read this thread over at Champions Online
Soooo… Can we put the debate over whether the Champions system encourages cherrypicking of powers with no attention to thematic cohesion to bed now?
I’m sure it’s been commented on already, but I think regen is supposed to scale with recovery instead of presence.
Good info though, and I enjoy your blog very much.
Cheers!
Actually regeneration scales solely with recovery and character level. However, you’re going to want a lot of constitution with a regen build anyway, since the extra HP buffer gives regeneration that much more time to get going.
I suppose I should also mention that defiance stacks up to 6 tmies, not 8, and that there are a lot of other powers that will give a defensive benefit other than the various passives. The passives are certainly the most defense for the power point, though, but it stands to reason they should be since you can only have one of them and they are mututally exclusive with various other offense and support options.
As far as cherrypicking powers with no attention paid to theme — if you are interested in min-maxing, then to a degree yes. However, a lot of times there is a subtle bonus to staying mostly in a given power tree and only picking a handful of powers outside the tree. For instance, some buffs only affect certain kinds of powers, so you’ll get more mileage out of them if you have more powers within the correct tree(s) that those buffs affect. Also, how fast you can climb a tree to the top tier powers in that tree is directly determined by how focused you are on that tree early in your character’s career.
Regen scales with Rec, not Presence.
James is correct – Regen is an oddball and does not scale off of Presence.
There is nice synergy in building a Presence based tank/healer (since heals scale off of Presence) with Fiery Form. The damage add from Fiery Form scales off of Presence. While in many other games being the juggernaut of aggro absorption often means you’re anemic in the damage department – CO offers tanks that can heal themselves ably and pump out the DPS.
Not to state the obvious, but one of CO’s biggest problems is the lack of information about this stuff in an easily accessible form (some would call this form a “manual”). Even the now available downloadable manual doesn’t really cover this stuff very well.
In fact, I’d be interested to learn how people ferret out this info? I found a listing in the forums that basically said “For this framework, use these stats” and that’s what I’ve based my progression off, but I don’t know anything more granular than that.
There just seems to be a real richness to character building that is more or less opaque to the average gamer who *isn’t* going to be spending a lot of time theorycrafting in forums.
A lot of it is done just by going into the Powerhouse and playing with the powers, mining the combat logs for information and watching the floating numbers. Also, each power has an ‘advanced info’ clickable in the power description, also visible while you’re at the powerhouse talking to the power selection trainer, or by mouse hovering over the skill in your skillbar. It’s a bit awkward in some cases because exactly what information is presented and/or where you can find it can depend on what advantages you have or have not purchased for your powers, but a lot of this information is out there for people to discover if they want to look for it.
The lack of a wiki capturing all this info is simply a symptom of the game’s newness. There are community members working on pulling this info together at a couple different sites, but it appears for the moment to be a labour of love on the part of a dedicated few with limited amounts of available time and a lot of material to cover. The forums are where the more detailed stuff tends to get posted because these are people interested in working out specific aspects of the game that interest them in particular, so can dive in a lot deeper on that one aspect.
@Zed – I don’t mean to take away from the people working hard to uncover and share this info. They’re awesome for doing it and they are adding a lot of value to the game. But in most games you can hover over say, “Strength” and immediately get the info that it increases melee damage and carrying capacity (for example).
When you hover over stats in CO you get a description of what it is good for but it doesn’t always map intuitively to a power. I mean sometimes it does. Dexterity influencing shooting a gun (munitions) makes sense, but if you really want to buff up Nano Swarm, it isn’t obvious what stat you’d use.
There’s nothing so clear as (for example) this post in the CO UI (is there? am I just missing something obvious?) and there’s no decent manual to make up for in-game lacking. It shouldn’t be up to the fans to dig out this info in a game that’s so different from a typical MMO.
Or to rephrase that, I think CO would have a lot more satisfied players if Cryptic published the info a player needs to make informed choices.
I agree with Pete, there should have been more information or a better tutorial section. The tutorial isn’t much better than the 3 page pamphlet in the cd case.
I don’t see why they didn’t have a tutorial concerning the UI with a voice over and there should have been more explanation about powers and power sets and how they scale with stats.
But, even with all this said, the game is very addictive and as the unknown blogger has mentioned, even dying a lot because you don’t know what your doing can be just as much fun, course knowing is half the battle.