Friday, September 18, 2009

The Powerhouse and You

As you may already know, the powerhouse is the first spot you hit whenever you get a new level. This is the place where you purchase all of your talents, powers, and advantages. But did you know about all the neat things you can do there?

Currently, a lot of powers and advantages don't... exactly work. However, the powerhouse gives you a chance to test out most of your powers so you can tell if something is working the way it's supposed to. Remember, just because the tooltip says what something does, doesn't mean it actually works!




This is the main room, which you are probably familiar with. If not, these are the trainers that teach you your new skills. But once you buy something, don't be quick to rush off back to fighting villians. Make sure you take some time to test your new skills. Retcons of new skills are free until you leave the powerhouse.

Now there are four different rooms you can peruse in the powerhouse. Straight ahead is the travel room, where you can test your new travel powers. The room to the left is the stationary/grouped dummy test room. The room to the right is the mobile dummy test room, and if you go further down that hall, you can test your resistances in the laser room.



This is the travel room. As you can see, it's quite tall. The idea is that you can become
comfortable with your travel powers to make sure you made the right decision. The platforms and such are for testing powers like acrobatics and Super Jump, but in all hone
sty it won't prepare you for what those skills are really like.

While it's intended for travel powers, it has the benefit of almost no interaction with others. Here you can test stationary skill, pets, etc against crates without other people messing up your
attacks.



This is the stationary and grouped dummy room. Here is where you're going to run into the most people and you may need to transfer to a different server if there's too many people there.

The dummies give you a chance to generate energy and to use high power attacks, as well as see how certain powers work on "living" beings in groups. If you plan on doing any kind of combo
with powers, test it here. Even if it seems like it works or works with like powers, it may not work. A perfect example is that si
ngle blade bleeds don't work with Devour Essence, even though supernatural ones work. Just test it to be sure.


This is the laser room. This is the place where you test new defenses that you may have obtained, and see what kind of damage you can take. There are 4 different lasers that do consistent damage before resistance.

Red Beam - 108 Damage
Yellow Beam - 217 Damage
Green Beam - 434 Damage
Blue Beam - 868 Damage

The problem with testing healing skills here is that you're not in combat. Because of that, you're going to have to use your combat log. Protip: Right Click on "Combat Log" and deselect "Combat (Other)" in order to only show you and your team's combat information.


The final room is the mobile dummy room. There's not much to this room for PvE, but for PvP it can help test holds/stunlocks. The other nice thing about this room is that it has a lot less people than the stationary/group room.

Next time you're in the Powerhouse, try out some of the rooms you haven't used before. That might help you see if a power will end up a lemon before you actually have to pay to retcon it!

No comments:

Post a Comment