Search Results: 19 messages were found

I'm seeing a lot of complaints on the forums and in-game about Team Patcher (either in discussions about HP5s or directed at me). So, I've been talking to Legion/CoS/SF about it after fight sometimes, and I'm get comments sometimes of the time about how "you know, that probably shouldn't have worked." Still, Legion/CoS/SF have been pretty used to me rolling as a TS so it's not the most objective info. Additionally, I can't exactly split between player skill and the actual tree (considering that I heal in almost every MMO I play, I'd hope I'd be good at it by now SMILEY

).

So, not taking commentary about my favored class lightly, I may as well ask the fine folks of Recursion that have fought some of the best Patchers around ( SMILEY

) what they thought.

So, what I'm asking all the Mero/Zion PvPers are a couple quick questions (offer explanations or extra commentary if you'd like):

Do you feel healing is currently important in PvP?

Do you feel healing should be important in PvP?

How do you approach fighting a group with a Patcher? (Don't need specific strats if you've got them, just want to know if you're mindset changes if they're present.)

Does your enjoyment of a fight change if a Patcher is present?

Do you feel Patcher is "cheap"? (Basically, do you feel that someone shouldn't use Patcher in certain situations / at all?)

What's your biggest gripe about Patcher?

What's a couple things you'd like changed about Patcher?

Thanks, and hopefully those questions don't seem too off the wall SMILEY

.

I've always sort of wanted to ask this, but especially now that I've been posting on the CR2.0 boards answering questions and stuff, there are some things I still don't get.

Why do you use a certain loadout in a certain situation?

I don't really mean why you'd load Compel Close Combat over Detection, but more like, why do you walk around with KF GM when you're not doing anything, or why you love going Duelist in PvP. For me, it's always been, Patcher when things got serious, and Spy (now Gunner) when I'm just talking to people, or PvPing really casually.

To give you a bit of background as to why I'm asking: I never really got why people loved to use MA before, and I don't really understand why a lot of people seem to roll with Operative now. Operatives are sort of the benchmark right now for loadouts since they have those purty big damage moves, yet people compare something else to it, and I can't help but say, "Well that's Operative, X is good at A, B, C, and especailly at D"... and it doesn't seem to register.

Maybe if I understand why people use what they use, I can communicate a certain tree's strengths to those people better SMILEY

.

Already /bugged these but wanted to bring it to everyone's attention...

All of the Team Patcher buffs are giving the old "Heal and Upgrade Radius" bonus that isn't being affected by the new "Buff Area Radius Bonus". While I still feel that I'm getting a size boost from the abilities, none of the bonuses in the Team Patcher tree or from attributes do a single thing to it?

Are these buffs meant to be static or is it that they just didn't get convered?

Here's a few paragraphs regarding the upcoming free trial from the April Newsletter:

The Matrix: Relaunched
Between May 1 and May 14, 2006, Sony Online Entertainment will be offering a 10-day free trial through Fileplanet. New players trying out the game will be granted the Hyper-Jump Beta Ability, which allows characters to hyper jump through the Mega City beginning at level 1 (Hyper Jump is not normally available until level 10). Not everyone falls the first time, it seems.

In addition, players who successfully convert their free trial accounts to full subscriber accounts will be granted the Mobius Code Ability. This is an emergency use Ability that restores around one-third your maximum health—perfect to get in the killing blow or make good your escape. Redpills have reported that the code seems to malfunction occasionally, granting them invulnerability to targeted Abilities for a few seconds. Agents have been dispatched to investigate these claims.

Now, judging from Rarebit's reply to a specfic question about Mobius Code I doubt we'd be able to get any answers, but I for one would like to see all current accounts getting both abilities (if they don't have them already).

This isn't a new gift with an expansion or anything, these are old abilities that were granted for something specfic. I understand Beta jump beacuse being able to Hyper-Jump from your first second out of the hardline is really quite nice. Why not just drop the requirement on Hyper-Jump to like level 2 if it's such a big selling point?

Mobious Code though... I know a couple in Legion at least that don't have it and really wish they did.

I just wanted to get everyone's opinions on this, because at first glance, it doesn't look pretty.

For some disclosure first: my first tree in this game was Team Patcher and down to Trauma Surgeon, and I love being the healer. Also, I was really glad to see the actual healing be back in Patcher with CR2.0, that said... there's a rather large problem with it now.

Here's a bit of info:

Your Group Heal 1.0 has restored 684 health to yourself. (consistant)
Your Health Pill 5.0 has restored 330 health to yourself. (average)

Group Heal 1.0 is a 4s launch with a 2s re-use, and since it can be used constantly, that means its' healing 684 damage every 6 seconds. HP5.0 takes about 10s to loop (2s launch + 8s re-use), so that's an average of 330 healing every 10s.

That's 147 health healed every second to an area about 8.5m in diameter (this is assuming the Trauma Surgeon heals and the rest of the group inhales Health Pill 5.0s, the TS can do Patcher to make up the difference a bit).

Let me just reiterate before I get to the final two numbers, with the economy in shambles and the large influx of red frags these past couple weeks, the only limit on the amount of Health Pill 5.0s you can carry is: your inventory space. They're simply that easy to make. In terms of IS for the heals, GH 1.0 is the most effecient in-IL heal (second overall to Restore Group 3.0) and 20 IS is two rounds of Block.

That said, I'll ask a question to everyone:

Can you do a constant 588 damage (588 = 147 * 4s) to someone every interlock round? How many people would that take to do that sort of DPS?

Let's walk through it with my normal loadout at 2.6k health:

I'll get Suplexed for around 1000 damage. Health = 1600

During the Suplex animation and his next round for a roll-out, I will heal for 680 (just to round the numbers down). Health = 2280

Most outside-IL specials like Full Auto (Redux), Three Round Burst, or Sniper Shot hit for around 700-800 damage. If three hit me at the same time... Health = 0

Now, only in the situation that three OMG specials hit me at the same time, will I die. That required 4 guys working in unison to take me out. One miss here, a low damage there, and they couldn't get enough specials off on me to outdamage my healing.

You'd have to wait for another set-up move to try and kill me. (Now Code Shock would of course screw over my first heal, but it wouldn't do any initial damage, so the result would be the same if I was quick on the heal.)

It would take 4 guys to do that sort of DPS to simply out-damage my heals. There's probably something wrong with that.

Already /bugged it but, is Passive Code (Patcher) intended to stay on at all times?

Its description, "Use this self-buff to increase your Healing influence for a short time." and it has the same re-use timer (90s) as the other low-level buffs (Overclock, Firearms Skill, etc.) so why is it staying on all the time (it does the whole scan-line thing like Tactics, Evade or the Hyper-Buffs)?

In its current state, the only reason I can see it being useful is to have both +Healing from it and +Damage from Upgrade Master (as Improved Hacking doesn't play well with UM), which is honestly really, really useful.

Message Edited by Cal on 04-17-2006 11:27 PM

I've been trying to nail the exact damage and resistance formulas down for the past couple of days and after reading this thread I was finally able to get a handle on at least the simpliest of these: Healing.

The Healing formula is pretty simple:

Amount Healed = ((Ability HPS * (100% + Healing Bonus %)) + Healing) * Tactic's Damage Boost * Launch Time

Still... when trying to apply this same formula to damage, I'm normally off by too much to attribute to rounding errors, thus without being able to know how much damage goes in, I can't really get any resistance formula out.

Thankfully though, all of the laughter over "ok, take your clothes off" on TS was not lost since I was able to come up with a rough resistance guide:

1 Point of Resistance = -.67 Damage Taken, in whole numbers...
3 Points of Resistance = -2 Damage Taken

Or, in English: for every 3 points of resistance, you'll take 2 less points of damage.

Also, it's important to remember that HCFrog has stated that the "max useful resistance is (Level * 5)." Now, is that based off of your level alone or off of your opponent's level (i.e. the effective cap would be higher if you are fighting a level 52 then if you were fighting another 50)?

How does your Resistance Bonus come into play? No clue as, it's "not playing nicely", but it isn't something as simple as Total Resistance = Resistance + Bonus SMILEY

.

Hopefully this will help get these nailed down before long.

In the CR2.0 if buffs add to the same abilities, they will either override each other, or (less then ideally) block the buff from being applied ("... has a higher version running." SMILEY

.

Also, which buffs gets through is not based on the actual buff stats, but on the buff itself (a Trauma Surgeon with low +Viral Dmg might override a Hacker's Overclock, even though Overclock gives him higher +Viral Dmg).

When refering to Force Enhancer/Multiplier's toggle buffs, only the aura is blocked on the target, so if you have Viral Shielding on, you can still give Deflect Virus 1.0 to your group as long as they themselves don't have Viral Shielding on.

These buffs do stack:

Combat Evasion: Gaussian Blur (Hacker) and Resist Combat (Team Patcher)

Awakened's "Hyper-X" Set: Hyper-Deflect and one of the following, Hyper-Dodge/Sense/Block

Sweeps: Negative Conditon Sweep 1.0 (Upgrade Artist), 2.0 (Upgrade Master), Sweep Party 1.0 (Force Enhancer), and 2.0 (Force Multiplier)

These buff series do not stack:

Health Regen Rate: Fast Healing 1.0 (Guardian Patcher) and 2.0 (Doctor)

Viral Resistance: Personal Firewall 1.0 (Guardian Patcher) and 2.0 (Upgrade Artist)

Max Health: Bolster Health 1.0 (Patcher), 2.0 (Upgrade Artist), and 3.0 (Upgrade Master) (I haven't been able to test between BH 3.0 and Upgrade Health (Physician).)

Movement Speed: Movement Accelerator 1.0 (Patcher), 2.0 (Upgrade Artist), and 3.0 (Upgrade Master)

Viral Defense: Network Firewall (Team Patcher) and Viral Shielding (Trauma Surgeon)

Below are the multi-stat buffs that overwrite each other:

Class Buffs

You may only have one class buff active at any time.

Healing

Passive Code (Patcher) is overwritten by Improved Hacking (Force Multiplier)

Viral Damage

Overclock (Virologist) is overwritten by Improved Hacking (Force Multiplier)

Viral Defense

Hyper-Deflect (Awakened) is overwritten by Viral Shielding (Trauma Surgeon)

Deflect Virus 1.0's Aura (Force Enhancer) is overwritten by Viral Shielding (Trauma Surgeon)

Accuracies

You cannot have either Weapons Boost or Combat Training active at the same time, they overwrite each other. (Corpsman)

Combat Enhancement 1.0 (Guardian Patcher) is overwritten by Combat Aura 1.0's Aura (Team Patcher)

Combat Enhancement 1.0 (Guardian Patcher) is overwritten by Weapons Boost/Combat Training (Corpsman)

Weapons Boost/Combat Training (Corpsman) are overwritten by Combat Aura 1.0's Aura (Team Patcher)

Damages

Combat Aura 2.0's Aura (Force Mulitplier) is overwritten by Upgrade Master.

--

That should be all of them SMILEY

.

Programmer

Code Shaper

--

Please remember to /bug it if you encounter something weird, and confirm any bugs/oddities/etc. you find and report your own wierdo stuff in this thread.

Thanks.

Hacker Focus Thread
Operative Focus Thread

Spy

Soldier

--

Please remember to /bug it if you encounter something weird, and confirm any bugs/oddities/etc. you find and report your own wierdo stuff in this thread.

Thanks.

[CR2.0 Focus Thread] Coder Bugs
[CR2.0 Focus Thread] Hacker Bugs

Message Edited by Cal on 03-28-200608:22 AM

Patcher

Patcher: Passive Code is not making the transition to CR2.0 (as in, if you had the ability yesterday, you no longer have it). (Last seen in: EPTS Update 15).

Trauma Surgeon: Panicked Heal heals for 1 damage. (Last seen in: EPTS Update 15)

Virologist

Virologist: Overclock was supposed to be granted if you had the CR1.0 ability Avoidance (who's place was taken by Overclock). This ability was not granted at all. (Last seen in: EPTS Update 15)

--

Please remember to /bug it if you encounter something weird, and confirm any bugs/oddities/etc. you find and report your own in this thread.

Thanks.

[CR2.0 Focus Thread] Coder Bugs
[CR2.0 Focus Thread] Operative Bugs

Message Edited by Cal on 03-28-200608:22 AM

Already /bugged it but...

Whenever you buff, it takes your stats (attributes/clothes/loadout) to determine what actual effect the buff gives. The problem is, that it's taking your stats into account when you buff someone else too.

So if I buff someone's Viral Defense or Melee Acc and I have minimal Belief, they'll get a "bad" buff. This comes as a problem when certain buffs don't override well (I'm looking at you Upgrade Master) and a few other possible weird situations.

The folks at Mara C were bouncing around the idea that it was intentional, but it seems kind of odd at least.

Also, as a nearly complete aside, when is Panicked Heal getting looked at?

I was wondering about something with the new changes to Viral Acc in IL comming soon:

Are Viral attacks still considered specials, as in: when a Hacker uses a Viral attack does it still create a zero-sum situation in IL?

I remember the old Prima strat guide had a little blurb before each set I guess (like Force Mulitplier or Operative) that told you a bit about them.

It's just that looking at the game now, I just see some new player going, wow Trauma Surgeon sounds cool! What's it do though? What should I be expecting when I play it?

Maybe something like these examples:

Ballista: The Ballista tree is centered around single-target Viral damage. It is designed to be a DPS class, with only moderate crowd-control/debuffing. It meshes well with the other Virologist trees by giving them single-target direct damage abilities.

Trauma Surgeon: The Trauma Surgeon is tree designed around group healing with some survivability. In terms of offense it depends mainly on using Melee or guns instead of the Viral attacks of Physician. The tree also contains bonuses to your Heal and Buff Radius making it a strong tree if you wish to support a large group.

Aikido: The Aikido tree allows the red-pill to maintain control of an opponent through the Powerless and Enrage states, it also has self-buff abilities that allow it to soak up or avoid damage. It is the most durable of the Martial Arts trees, but lacks the raw damage potential of Karate.

Even so... referencing WoW (which I dislike to do honestly) when I picked Druid or Paladin, I knew sort of what to expect, what this specific thing is going to let me do.

Let's look at the descriptions for Kung Fu and Rifles for example:

Kung Fu: This advanced melee combat style has a small advantage in accuracy and defense.

Rifles: This advanced ballistic combat style is well balanced with a small advantage in accuracy and defense.

Ok, so Kung Fu and Rifles do the same thing, but one with a Rifle and the other with Kung Fu? If I want to be a sort of balanced operative (I don't like hacker or coder, or sneaking around) what's going to make me choose Kung Fu over Riflemen (or, what is going to make me want to specialize in one over the other)? Or what if I've been an Assassin all my time in the Matrix and I want to try something different, where do I choose to invest my $info?

Let's look at two Hybrid classes in WoW and what I can look up as their class role (couple clicks from the main page):

Druid: The Druid has three potential roles in a group. When in their normal, biped form, they act well as a healer and can give support in the form of buffs and debuffs; they also have limited crowd control against dragons. Their Bear form gives them offensive and defensive power enough to step up to a monster and take the hits (we're looking into aggro management for the form). In Cat form, the Druid becomes a damage dealer. This trio of roles in one class gives the Druid a diverse feel and allows them to perform nearly any role perceived as "needed" in a party. We're not telling you how to play the game - one of the fascinating practices of this genre is the ingenuity exercised by the players every day!

Paladin: Paladins are the consummate knights in shining armor, meant to be in the thick of things. Their defensive abilities allow them to stand toe to toe with monsters and take a beating - they are tanks overall. This is not the sole purpose of a Paladin, of course; their auras, seals, heals and resurrection spells give them the chance to act as a support healer. We're not telling you how to play the game - one of the fascinating practices of this genre is the ingenuity exercised by the players every day!

Ok, apart from the corny last lines, I know what to expect from these classes.

Let's come back to MxO and the question I ask myself a lot: as a Force Multiplier, am I meant to be very survivable, is it intended, is it something that is going to be taken away from me?

All I really know about FM is: it's a Patcher centered around team buffing, I don't know if it's meant to take damage, I don't know what this tree is supposed to be giving me.

I look at my Druid and I know, ok, I'm meant to be a top-notch healer, I lack utility, but if I feel I'm not accomplishing that role, I know there's something wrong.

If one day I log in and I'm paper as a Force Multiplier, I have no clue if they fixed a bug, if they added a bug, if that tree has been "reinvisioned"... I have no vision to test the tree against, no theoretical bar that I'm supposed to reach for roles X, Y, and Z.

Those vision documents have to be around there somewhere guys, why don't you show them to us?

I remember HCFrog saying that armor was affecting the amount healed, but I'm not sure if its been fixed yet.

Mainly I'm just trying to figure out if I should draw conclusions based on my healing power after today's PvP Test Event or not SMILEY

.

Being half-asleep with a legal pad and being in the test server with your code analyzer open is never a good thing...

anyway, I've been looking at HCFrog's (more like stalking through tracker) and other's posts and trying to get some theory behind making outfits. I decided to try and generalize the most important buffs from clothes: resistances.

Let's start off with one statement: all resistances are made equal. As in, you're trying to cover all 4 bases as evenly as possible.

Also, the assumption is made that the enhanced Gloves/Shades used are of the same value as the other enhanced items in terms of resistances.

To begin, let's start with your 4 core pieces which can come Armored or Shielded.

You take 2 level 50 pieces of each type...

2 Level 50 Armored pieces = (36 Melee Resist and 36 Ranged Resist) * 2 = 72 Melee and 72 Ranged
2 Level 50 Shielded pieces = (36 Viral Resist and 36 Thrown Resist) * 2 = 72 Viral and 72 Thrown

To generalize:

1 Level 50 Shielded/Armor piece gives 72 points of resistance over 2 types (36 each).
4 Core pieces = 72 to all or 288 (72*4) points of Total Resistance.

You now have 3 slots open which can take Enhanced items, we'll ignore the extra buffs that come along with Enhanced (3 Resist) items (although they are quite nice). Also, I'm not sure if these actual combinations exist (as my Level 50-req Enhanced collection is very limited), but let's continue.

1 Level 50 Enhanced Hat = 33 Melee/Ranged/Viral
+ 1 Level 50 Enhanced Gloves = 33 Ranged/Viral/Thrown
+ 1 Level 50 Enhanced Shades = 33 Melee/Viral/Thrown

= 66 Melee/Ranged/Thrown Resistance and 99 Viral Resistance

With minimal overlap:

1 Level 50 Enhanced (3 Resist) piece gives 99 points of resistnace over 3 types (33 each).
3 Enhanced pieces = 99 to one resistance and 66 to the other three, or 297 TR.

This simple, highly customizable (depending on Enhanced hats mainly) outfit grants:

138 Melee, Ranged and Thrown Resistance and
171 Viral Resistance

or 585 TR.

(Of course, the 171 resistance could be any of the four depending on which is present in all 3 pieces.)

Now, under ideal combinations, we are more efficient per piece with Enhanced (99 TR/piece) then with Shielded/Armored (72 TR/piece), and while less flexible also grants us the Enhanced pieces' other bonuses.

To take it to the extreme, let's create a set made of all Enhanced (3 Resist) pieces. This would give us:

99 TR/piece * 7 pieces = 693 TR

The math shows us ahead, let's place the resists into slots:

x. 33 Melee Ranged Viral Thrown (the non-present buff shown with a _)

1. 33 M R V _
2. 33 _ R V T
3. 33 M R _ T
4. 33 M _ V T

5. 33 M R _ T
6. 33 _ R V T
7. 33 M R V _

Since I did this on legal pad and all, for the ease of calculation, each buff is missing from one of the pieces in 1-4 so... ((4-1) * 33) = 99 to each resist.

In the last three, Ranged is present in all three, so it has 99 resists from the second set as well, and Melee/Viral/Thrown have 66 resists (as they're only found in two pieces, or 33*2).

99 * 2 = 198 Ranged Resistance
99 + 66 = 165 Melee/Viral/Thrown Resistance

198 + (165*3) = 693 TR

Ok, so the math looks good, but let's ground it with an analysis of what HCFrog said here:

HCFrog wrote:
For damage resistance it is different -- I don't know offhand how high you can get your resistances using just buffs, but the bulk will probably come from clothing. If you're a level 50 and you have top level resistance clothing, including some new glasses and gloves in upcoming patches, you can get two resistances to 216. Over 250 won't really do anything for you, as the max useful resistance is (level * 5). I would be interested to see how high a player could get all 4 resistances, with top level clothes, buffs, stats, and anything else they can think of

Let's see if we can get to that 216 for Melee and Ranged Resistance.

4 Level 50 Armored pieces = 4 * 36 M/R = 144

216 - 144 = 72pts left

For the sake of simplicity let's make the 3 Enhanced pieces all Melee/Ranged/Thrown.

3 Level 50 Enhanced pieces = 3 * 33 M/R/T = 99

144 + 99 = 243

We're a little over the HCFrog's number but it does to go along with this post later on in the thread of getting resists near/over 240.

Ok... so everything seems to work. Let's head back to the first statement about resist equality. I wanted to get resists as high and as close together as possible.

Let's look at the averages for these theoretical kits:

4 Armored/Shielded + 3 Enhanced = 146.25 Average Resistance
7 Enhanced (3 Resist) = 173.25 Average Resistance

If you were to attempt to max two resistances out the Average Resistance would still be 146.25, but the your lowest resistance would only be 33 (from the above, you'd swap one M/R/T for an M/R/V).

Certain items can of course be substituted for pure Resistance with a couple of notable ones like Emma's Vengence or the Seraphim Shoes where the small Resistance loss (for not being Level 50 reqs) is far outweighed by their other benefits, then again these are obatined through the hardest Hideout and the final Pandora's Box SMILEY

.

Still though, with the loss of Resistance info, how much of an effect does an average of 30 resistance make (especially considering the difficulty of balancing seven Enhanced items), without taking into account plugging it into your specific choice of attributes (which would further confuse things)?

Hopefully though, this post helped clarify how to look at one part of dressing in CR2.0...

maybe SMILEY

.

As a preface I play Trauma Surgeon/Force Multiplier as my main build on live so I'm a tad attached to it.

With the Trauma Surgeon class buff, my larger (6m) buffs and heals are hitting nearly 30m+ (balanced stats, mainly resistance and IS regen clothing). That basically allows 1 or 2 TS/FMs to support a large fighting force on a large-ish battlefield (Mara NW for example, where people can get really spread out for a TS/FM). This would also make buffing mid-fight a lot easier, which is nice. To counter-act that though, Sweep Party 2.0 has about a 5s lapse window between its duration and cooldown, so you'd need 2 Sweepers to keep an entire group under SP2.0 (a nice trade-off for the 30m radius). Also, group buff durations are still 5-10m so they'll have to be applied mid-fight a lot.

An ability that I've normally ignored, Delete Upgrade 2.0 now appears a lot more useful thanks to its 150 Buffer Fill (and that I can actually hit people with it now)!

On the healing front, it really comes down to the two top Class abilities, FM and TS. With TS, I can get a lot of healing out fast, but I'm burning IS. With Force Mulitplier, I can heal more efficiently, with my (really) low HPS heals becoming almost area HoTs. The ability to spam heals is hindered by the fact that Panicked Heal (the OMG bombed, emergency heal) healed me for all of 1 damage.... still, I'm extremely glad that my heals might actually be worth the IS (rather then being a Sweep-bot).

Force Enhancer is another OMG button, either letting me finish someone off that pesky Destroyer that needs to die (now) or letting me survive for those couple extra seconds for back-up to arrive. As it stands now, both aspects of it are underwhelming. It doesn't really increase survivablity much as it's only on 16% of the time and I'm still getting clobbered. It also doesn't increase my DPS enough to really be worth the IS cost.

With DPS, understanding that fights are meant to take a lot longer, I've had duels last 10mins+ (since I had lost all my buffs by the time I died), I never really had a chance to dent my opponent (a couple of tests against various Gunman builds), but it did take forever (10mins), I guess that's just the tank aspect of FM shining through. Still, this didn't feel like the kind of tanking where I waited for a mistake and pounced on them, this was the sort that depends on who goes to make a sandwich first.

That's really my main compliant with Team Patcher right now, it looks like it will do its area support job wonderfully, but the burst DPS aspect of it is all but vanished and it cannot last forever beacuse of its terrible small-fight IS-efficiency (.5 HPS/IS versus Physician's 2 HPS/IS).

Should TS/FM be the ultimate area support class while at the same time being very dangerous in combat... no, but possibly increasing the power of Force Enhancer (maybe even increasing the cooldown to 10mins to balance that) would allow it to be dangerous for a little bit...

hopefully that made some sense there.

Sorta :smileytongue:.

Davo, Chaotic, Zero, Skaald, Cow, 40 and I all ended up hoping on MxO tonight and we kinda like... started a war (the official line is, "We blame Zeromous.") There was some solid PvP at ye olde Mara Central for 6-7 hours and I'm proud to say the Machinists held Mara for the majority of the time and at the end of the night (or beginning of the morning, lol).

Nice work to everyone involved on all three sides tonight. Need to give a special thanks to Dxy for incuring the brunt of my Assassin moves on my first real night back.

Honestly, it was ton of fun for us and we'll probably be terrorizing
Mara some more soon, beacuse well... it's how Legion rolls if you
haven't forgotten (send all hate mail to Midnight for getting us thinking about MxO again).

Oh yeah... and OMGWTFBBQPWND, hide the bluepills 'cause we're back folks SMILEY

.

As it stands now, the most powerful ability in Zen Master is the first one... this allows builds like:

Expert Riflemen

Karate Master

Technique from Zen

With:

Solid Combat ability in/out of IL.

Max Deflection (Bandana w/ 3 Deflection Items or Ninja Mask w/ 2).

Easily Maxed Melee/Ranged Resistances

Little sacrifice for Awakened abilities.

In addition, little is dependent on attributes (although males can eliminate one Deflection item if they're Focus whores).

Of course, with Deflection being such a all or nothing issue in PvP, if
you lower Technique's buff to something like 1.5pts/level or even
1:1... it just isn't useful and we'll revert to the standard Deflection
builds. It's an odd act to balance and that's probably why they're
pulling it rather then leaving it in and then balancing it. Only thing
I can think of to make this useful is to either nerf the Resist
abilities or make a sort of Zen GM and have the bonuses split (would
take the Karate Master part away and make the person load only Zen GM's
first ability and the Expert Rifles).