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[Fortunata]

#31

Villain Epics: Arachnos Soldier & Widow / Arachnos Widows, a discussion.

Last post by EDekar - May 06, 2025, 09:33 AM

The other day I was tooling around in Mids just randomly seeking inspiration and thought to myself: "You know what, I don't know if I've ever seen a Night Widow player running around.  I don't remember them, so let's take a look in Mids and see what they have."

That is when I discovered that Night Widow kind of... doesn't have a reason to exist.  Everything a Night Widow can do, a Fortunata can do better.  Moreover, Night Widow feels unfinished; they get far fewer powers unlocked than Fortunata, Crab, or Bane do, and those powers are adding little to their kit.

So what's the difference then, eh?  Well, let's take a look.

Fortunata

Full array of psychic blast options.  If you like Psychic Blast, you'll like Fortunata, as there's really nothing missing here.
Full base suite of claw-like attacks with added toxic damage, -recharge, -speed, and a smattering of -regeneration.  This is common to all Widows.
Fortunata Teamwork (their armor) offers a stealth, Mind Link (PBAoE +def (all) & +res (psionic)), a single target confuse, a unique version of Vengeance, and Aura of Confusion (mag 3 PBAoE Confuse on 240s cooldown).
Mask Presence, the stealth, is... odd.  If you go pure psychic blast route, it's really just a standard imperfect stealth.  If you go hybrid and mix in some melee attacks, those melee attacks can crit from stealth.

Night Widow

Mental Blast, which is staying thematically in-character I guess?
Build Up, which is mutually exclusive to the base kit's Follow Up (both are good, this will largely come down to personal preference).
Smoke Grenade, which is again largely thematic.  Not a bad power, but not build defining in any measure.
Slash, which is an excellent single target claw attack and your preferred opener from Mask Presence.
Eviscerate, which is essentially the same as Claw's version with the usual Widow add-ons.
Psychic Scream, which is lifted from Psychic Blast as per usual.
For Widow Teamwork, their 'armor' set, they get:
Mask Presence (stealth)
Mental Training (+spd, +recharge)
Mind Link (see Fortunata)
Placate (necessary for stealthcrit playstyle if you're not a Stalker)
Tactical Training: Vengeance (see Fortunata, but it's just easier to access Vengeance really)
Elude, as seen on TV- I mean as taken directly from Super Reflexes with all of its upsides and downsides.

So Night Widow is essentially just base kit Widow except it gets Placate, Slash, and Build Up.  The rest of it I could take or leave.
By comparison, Fortunata can hybridize and have the same damage potential with the addition of full melee and ranged attack chains, should they wish to do so.

Fortunata is, in my opinion, the only real viable route for Widows, but even then I don't especially recommend them outside of very specific circumstances.  Widows, you see, are squishy.  Like both of the Villainous Epic Archetypes (VEATs), they thrive with heavy investment and incarnate scaling.  With both active, Widows can pull off some truly silly nonsense.  On the other hand, put 'em on a Secret Master of <strike force> (SMo) and what you have is a pretend Stalker with none of their defenses and a pale shade of their damage.

What, don't believe me?  I've been literally one-shot by an AV on Barracuda's SMo strike force from an AoE targeting the tank.  I didn't have aggro, and I certainly wasn't getting punched in the face... but that single attack was all it took to remove me from the fight and fail the SMo.  Widows simply do not have the mitigation necessary to stand toe to toe in melee.

Why roll a Widow?  Let's take a look.

Pros

Stylish as hell.
Premium psychic/natural assassins thematically.
Excellent team support through innate Leadership abilities, which can stack with pool Leadership.
Mind Link.  There's a reason almost everyone who takes Widow seriously does their best to make this permanent, which can be a bit of a challenge since it doesn't accept Recharge Enhancements (for some reason?).

Cons

Redraw.  If you want to switch between psychic blast attacks and claw attacks, you're going to have to redraw every single time.
Squishy.  Poor personal defenses overall.
Average damage.  1.0 damage scale to both ranged and melee.
Average max HP at 2409.5.  This is about 400 HP higher than Stalker, but without an armor set.  It is tied with Scrappers (as well as other EATs).
Weapon customization.  You'd think that, using claws, they would get claws customization options.  Like Soldier, they do not.  You only get basic Arachnos Claws options, of which there are few.
Uniform customization.  Few to no enhancements have been made to the uniform since its inception, with the most egregious offenders being the lack of newer hairstyles added since Widows were released.

So what do others think?  Am I way off base here?  I've seen more Regeneration characters than I have Night Widows, and considering that Regeneration is the worst armor set in PvE (but is excellent in PvP!), that seems rather strange.

#32

General / Re: Silly Speculative Discussi...

Last post by EDekar - May 05, 2025, 05:32 PM

Well, I can't speak too much of the mechanical scaling of such.  @brw316 is the most knowledgeable person I know for understanding the basis of how power scaling and balance works in City of Heroes, so I'll have to defer to them for any depth.

Instead, I'll give an example.  There's another rogue server that made it so that all story contacts, enemy groups, and zones were scaled to your level.  This is great in some ways because it means you can't really outlevel contacts anymore, but on the other hand... Hellions, for example, straight up do not have the firepower or scaling to contend with high level characters.

The lesson learned is that while there's kind of ways to get around it, it requires quite a lot of custom work to support it and keep balance intact.  Given that I'm a former Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 player, I'm all for flattening and lowering maximum level caps because I've never enjoyed the treadmill / vertical progression methodology so prevalent in older MMORPG's (and most new ones, let's be real).

Either way, it's an intellectual exercise at most.  Rebirth is fundamentally a 'what would the original developers have done' server, and there's absolutely no way they ever would have changed the level cap.  Their method of adding progression was adding the incarnate system, which they had plans for infinite expansion of as necessary.

#33

General / Silly Speculative Discussion

Last post by GrimGriz - May 05, 2025, 01:18 PM

I have a CoH thing in my mind that's completely irrelevant and unrealistic, but I thought I'd try bouncing it off people who knew the game better in the hopes that they'd be able to point out how ridiculous the notion(s) are so I can stop imagining them.

The notion is something like - could the treadmill be pulled and the game still function. Specifically, there's really not that much difference between my lvl 8 mission and my lvl 43 missions, as evidenced by sidekicking/exemplaring.

The question is, could the what, 0-54 levels of 'difficulty/power' be collapsed into 7 or 9. In short, the difference between a Hellion and a Sky-Raider lore-wise have been artificially inflated such that we can have 54 levels of leveling, and it would be interesting to see a realm without out - at least in my mind.

#34

Live Bug Reporting / Re: Belladonna Vetrano Moralit...

Last post by EDekar - May 02, 2025, 11:54 AM

Ya know, as someone who has always gone the 'hero' route through Power, I would never have known this behavior.  I always betray Praetor Sinclair (because seriously, what a tool) to side with Belladonna (who, let's be honest, isn't much better), then deal with the ambush of a couple nobody sergeants I've never heard of.  In the meantime, my team remains alive and I move on with my life, sometimes coming back 'round to Loyalist through another arc and sometimes just staying Resistance.

[WST SCHEDULE (5/05/2025 - 06/01/2025)]

#35

Looking for Group / Re: WST Schedule 2025 - Curren...

Last post by FarmTank - Apr 27, 2025, 08:27 PM

WST SCHEDULE (5/05/2025 - 06/01/2025)

5/05: Terra Volta (44-50), Numina (35-40), Tin Mage (50 w/ Alpha), ITF (35-50)

5/12: Moonfire (23-28), Positron (10-15/11-16), Mortimer Kal (20-40), Barracuda (45-50)

5/19: Eden (39-41), Synapse (15-20), Renault (25-30), LGTF (45-50)

5/26: Apex (50 w/ Alpha), Penelope Yin (20-25), Tree of Thorns (24-33), Lord Recluse (45-50)

#36

Off-topic / Re: Joshexs Dreamtime

Last post by EDekar - Apr 27, 2025, 01:56 PM

That or a Shadow.  Heavens know my wife sees those on occasion.  Ends up saging the whole apartment after getting spooked.  Every once in a while she'll ask me 'Dekar, did you walk by here a minute ago?' to which I'll tell her 'No, I was in the computer room.'.  Then she'll shiver, I'll ask her if it was a Shadow again, and so the incense gets whipped out haha.

I have to admit I miss dreaming.  It was fun asserting lucidity in nightmares!  'You're in my realm now, <redacted>!' /cackle

#37

Off-topic / Re: Joshexs Dreamtime

Last post by Joshex - Apr 26, 2025, 01:13 PM

"and here I thought I had had a good night"

my dreams were good. they were still very vivid and lucid. but nothing strange to report, or so I thought.

I slept til 5:30 am when bugbites on my leg started to itch too bad to stay asleep, I tried to go back to sleep until 6, it didn't work so I got up to go to the north side of the house to put something on the bites. then I came back and went to sleep, had a strange dream but not a bad dream. then got up not long ago.

but then I was told by another person in the house they saw me get up at 4:30 in the morning and stand in the door of their room. they don't know about my dreamlogs or any of the strange stuff I report here. however at the time they say I was there I can verify I was in my room sleeping with my door closed.

odlly enough my first dream wasn't a dream. it was my brain doing what it does sometimes.. it was reviewing anime and cartoons I had watched while awake and considering what would have happened if [insert change in plot] and doing that for hundreds of plot changes parallel to eachother. my subconscious does this as a hobby with his time. it takes mental effort to stop said "alternate plot overviews", kinda like theres inertia and force behind it and I need to bring it to a stop. sometimes it goes on in the background while watching things, and it can cause headaches if writers pull things and include bad endings that my brain wants to correct.

So I was aware I was physically in bed because my subconscious bogarded the rem state for anime review and I was essentially allong for the ride yet kinda awake too. I could feel covers on me and the bed under me and the cieling fan was blowing on me.

so, I didn't leave bed until 6am to go put bug bite stuff on in the north of the house. but someone saw me at 4:30 standing in the door of their room in the south of the house the other direction from my room. I did not dream such a thing. and at that time I was essentially lost in thought in bed. I told them it couldn't have been me because I was in bed then. they insisted it was definitely me. they said I was looking for the cat.


Wait, there was a first dream, it just came back to me. it was a dream parallel to my subconscious' anime review, in that dream I was in a park, and everyone was showcasing the use of super abilities applied to landscaping, I did some weeding of a large area, but for somereason grassclippings kept returning after I was done.. after that we left the park to go home in a car. I was in the passenger seat while a recurring dream character drove. we passed by a stray duckling on the roadside so I had them stop and went and picked it up, it had brown and yellow coloring, I thought we'd take it home and raise it. then the bugbites broke me out of that dream and it was just my subconscious doing anime review.

but I never left my room. so, it's strange someone saw me. I'm wondering if they saw dream-me or a spectre of me. but I didn't dream of going to their room. maybe they were dreaming. I don't know, just that they were certain I had been there.

if dream me did end up here, we'd probably have a Lucy Dreamtime episode until I woke up. I mean if I'm visible and corporeal in that state then so too will be anything I imagine in that state.  I just have to hope they dreamed this and dream me wasn't really here.

#38

General / Re: Attempt: Developing Web Mi...

Last post by Joshex - Apr 26, 2025, 12:56 AM

I work on this periodically, so far I've made a sorta kinda summary of the information types displayed in the effects tab. though not all powers have effects info. and some powers may break the mold. I guess it's good as is and individual powers will set what they put where in that tab. sometimes I overthink things and get stuck trying to one-size-fits-all something that needs to be dynamic. posting about it can help me see my logical errors. right, rather than dwell on it, I'll just adjust the height of the table cells and move on to the next tab.

the goal is to have the tabs ready to go at some default state so I can have all the object  IDs so I can start programming what info to fill in where, and consequently start dictionarying the meat of the program in stats. that will be a major chore lol. I could probably get through one powerset a day, if I work on it every day, which I probably wont, I have alot of commitments I'm juggling atm many are time sensitive, I still plan time for projects, but haven't had much hero-time lately.

#39

Villain Epics: Arachnos Soldier & Widow / Re: Arachnos Bane Soldier, add...

Last post by Redlynne - Apr 23, 2025, 01:49 PM

You will genuinely have better DPA dropping the mace and using the rifle, except at that point you're not really a Bane Spider, are you?  Bah.

At that point you're a Huntsman (rifle only attacks).

As a (former) Arachnos Soldier on previous servers (crashes to desktop on redside are just WAY TOO RELIABLE for me on Rebirth), playing a HuntsBane is actually a remarkably poor symmetry as a build. The underlying strengths of the Bane are basically "to be a Stalker with better group buffs" ... which means Stealth/Hide/Placate and bonus damage when making melee attacks with your Mace. This is where the Bane plays catch up on DPA, through damage buffing on attacks from Hidden (just like a Stalker) ... and just like with Stalkers, it isn't enough when fighting in sustained combat, but works just fine in "bursty" quick combat. But none of those damage bonuses for being Hidden accrue to attacks made using the Arachnos Rifle. So a HuntsBane is this sort of weird hybrid of a blaster/defender who can stealth (which suppresses in combat).

To my mind, the primary and overriding reason to choose Bane is because you don't want to wear a Crab Backpack for the rest of your life. Bane gets a few options to augment the playstyle, but they're mostly oriented around melee combat (ala Stalker) using the Mace while being a better team buffbot.

Conversely, a HuntsCrab gets Pets to herd and a Dull Pain equivalent power for increased survivability, rather than angling for sneaky/stealthy/assassin-y type powers and playstyle like the Bane does.

#40

Villain Epics: Arachnos Soldier & Widow / Re: Arachnos Bane Soldier, add...

Last post by thilenium - Apr 22, 2025, 04:12 PM

yea, the soldier classes but also warshade and the other flying thingy, whose name i have forgotten, definitely needed some more love. but even with the weapon change animation i can make a case for this class here, dubbing it a guardian-type of gameplay. no recasting of the teamstuff comes at the expense of tedious animations while dealing damage. I ve tested the damage back to back with my main and they are on par. take away the animations and you suddenly have a champ that outdamages a brute while having pretty solid team utility.
this way both classes have their reason of being.