MTeague

Mission Progress with Praetorian Contacts, I think makes sense to lose. They straight up tell you "finish any remaining business you have here before entering" a couple of times. You're leaving the dimension on either a diplomatic mission (if blueside) or for personal power and gain (if redside). It's written in kind of a "you might not be coming back for a loooooong time, if ever" way. But I very much want to keep my Praetorian alignment, particularly for characters I level up in First / Night Ward before ever going through the rift. And I very much agree that there should be a distinction between Loyalist/Power and Loyalist/Responsibility, etc when deciding whether to consider you Blue or Red side. I hate how certain events (Winter, Valentine's, etc) just blanket treat all Resistance as "close enough to a Hero" and all Loyalist as "close enough to a Villain". Yes, yes, "Cole is Bad", I get that,. But there's an ocean's worth of difference between Loyalist/Power and Loyalist/Responsibility, or between Resistance/Warden and Resistance/Crusader. If there's no actual data on character file for this, perhaps it can choose which one you are by which portal you went through... If you're Loyalist and chose Red, we'll peg you as Power, if you're Loyalist and chose Blue, we'll peg you as Responsibility, etc. I do think the Praetorian Titles should remain selectable even after you go through the rift. Even if the price of that might be I don't get to choose certain Red/Blue titles, EVER. Let me keep my Goldside title selections

Pure toxic without a positional component is extremely rare (if it exists at all) Psi attacks without a positional component are both a) rare, and b) usually non-damaging... CC like Terrorize or Sleep, etc but it is worth noting the word "usually". The Awakened in First Ward, for example, have some brutal auto-hit Psionic damage. They can do terrible, awful, things to you if you're not built for it.

My stance is "I don't enjoy stealthing missions, and I only join groups advertised as Kill All or Kill Most." Yet another solution to the problem, albeit a perhaps less popular one. But since you'll never see me in your group that wants to stealth everything, it's all good.

Depends on direction you want ot go with the character. If you want a more Batman Style Vigilante, projecting the killer of her parents on every criminal she fights, then go with #1. If you want someone who's more going for their own redemption and choosing a more noble path, then go with #2.

Rule of Cool, is Cool, but there's this pesky horrible thing called Game Balance. Now in a single player game, sure, go wild, mod your game out the wazoo, be as wacky crazy overpowered as you feel like. Dual Pistols that launch mini-nuke bullets? Sure! In a multiplayer game, Rule of Cool does not in fact override all other concerns and balance issues.

Yea, I can see that. I always have other Shiny Toys I want. And *so far*, my Defenders/Corruptors have had other defense or back-door-defense options. Storm/Sonic: Steamy Mist, Manuevers, Hurricane.... he takes VERY few hits soloing, enough for Power Transfer/Panacea/Entropic Chaos/ATO's to heal him back up. Beam/Force Field: Big Bubble. 'Nuff said 🙂 Dark Blast/Dark Miasma: -To Hit out the Wazoo = Effective +Defense Time/Energy Blast: Hate a rougher go at lower leves, but Foresight fixes everything. However, the Water/Sonic Corr and the Empathy/Psychic Blast Def are still low levels. Maybe by the time they get up there I'll be singing the praises of Weave. 🙂

I have thoroughly enjoyed all of First Ward, and Night Ward. Admittedly, a few missions in First Ward were a massive wipe, followed by a massive wipe, followed by a "recalculating strategy", followed by a win. The Shepherds and the Awakened can both be absolutely BRUTAL, esp if you're soloing. But I enjoy the Ward content significantly more than the older content. This is true. I mean, the number of missions per arc is typically smaller in the Wards. Most contacts have only 4-5 missions. But all missions are most certainly not created equally. Any random First Ward / Night Ward arc is probably a significantly greater challenge than say, The Mysterious General Z, or The Ring of Peebles arcs.

I don't think ANY of my characters use Nemesis Staff, or likely ever will. Goes against character concept too much, regardless of whether it may be effective. None of them have any reason to a giant staff with a gear on it shooting force bolts. My magic Villains do use Blackwand. I could use Blackwand on a Dark-Based hero as well. But the graphics are just wrong most of my heroes. I know short term "what you use while levelling" is completely 100% irrelevant to many people. And that's fine for them. For me, concept is absolutely 100% king, and inviolate. the origin-based things like Throwing Knives / Taser / Apprentice Charm, etc, I can pretty much always fit ONE of them in. It's not always the one for that characters origin, but one of them will typically mesh plausibly enough with whoever I've rolled up. That said, I don't see any reason to change the current power selection scheme, either.

That's actually why I don't like Manticore TF. Sooooo many groups want to stealth it. I'm much more a Kill All or Kill Most player at heart. Some TF's, I debate whether to solo, or to try to form a group that's actually on board with that idea.

I do like Kick/Boxing/Crosspunch. If you take all three, Crosspunch becoms surprisingly strong and it's a nice additional melee AoE attack with a very reasonable cooldown. Some Tanks (SS immediately leaps to mind...) gets their AE very late in the game. Crosspunch can make up a lot of difference. And on my Mind/Kin controller, Fulcrum Shift plus Crosspunch with Containment on held mobs? Yes please. I haven't needed Weave thus far though.

My only quibble is that Purples + PvP + ATO are not always always always the best choices to slot into a given power. It really depends on what set bonuses you're trying to stack. Having a purple set whose set bonuses you can keep all the way back to a Posi 1, is nice, of course. But if you need to stack DEFENSE, you may be better off with a Kinetic Combat or Touch of Death set in certain attacks. Sometimes I use Eradication in a PBAE over the corresponding purple set (Rag? Armageddon? I always mix them up). But certainly, if the bonuses the purples bring to the table are worth it to you, then absolutely yes do slot them somewhere. Particularly if your ATO procs reinforce your main role, like Scrapper, Stalker, Tanker, Brute, etc.

I didnt' even know what Discord *was* when I joined City of Heroes. But I was in Ventrilo pretty much every night when I still played WoW. Either for guild raiding, or just to yap with friends on non-raid-nights. Voice chat can be fun. Much more like a conversation, I don't have to watch a chat log, I don't have to even dedicate much screen space to chat log. And for raiding, Warcraft has Extremely Unforgiving raid mechanics once you get into Progression Raids, and it was .... well, I honesly cannot think of how we could have ever pulled out some of those wins with the requires coordination if everyone had to pause and type and read. Compare to just calling out certain phases, adds, or the occasional "Debuff is on Bag, Bag, get out melee!". It was hard enough getting people to react to voice instructions when they were focused on maximal DPS output. They'd NEVER have read chat and reacted in time. I guess I don't Discord in CoH because I'm leery of having a "regular" group who I always play with, or certain days of the week I always play on certain hours. I've had games (cough WoW cough) turn into Full Time Jobs because of that. I'm kind of keeping everyone else at arms length, socialable and friendly, but no long-term-alliances. It's more of a me issue than a discord issue.

Who's a good Blaster!? Yes, you are!!

Well. Not until they beat up Destiny and take it's lunch money and write themselves in. I mean, even if they weren't on the original Destined One list, if they fulfil the eventual criteria, then clearly they were Destined all along, and Destiny just had them take the scenic route to get there.

Lorewise, I'd want any VEAT's or HEAT's to start with new contacts, maybe for Heroes Dark Watcher could give you a pep talk about being an Undercover Longbow agent, or Arbiter Sands could instruct you that you are an Undercover Arachnos agent, and impress upon you the urgency of getting the information he wants, and "Glory to Lord Recluse, et cetera, et cetera..." THEN have you go and make your first moral choice for Resistance or Loyalist.

I also strongly recommend learning the Auction House and Enhancement Converters. I have lvl 15's running around with 40 million who were not sugar daddied at all. Because I'd get a few yellow recipes, craft them, spend some merits on converters, convert them into something people will pay a few million for, and post for sale. Then buy MORE yellow recipes, and MORE converters, and it feeds from there. Orange Salvage can be excellent seed money. You can post those for 1 inf and someone will buy for at LEAST 400,000, probably more. Homecoming market is like any other market and prices can and will fluctuate, so double check current going rate for some things rather than trust the exact numbers in a 2019 guide. But the same principles (buy cheap, convert to expensive, post expensives for sale) still hold true, even if you might have to pay 20,000 for each yellow recipe instead of 10,000. If you end up millions ahead, you really won't care about ten thousand this way or that.

I don't think a single one of my 40 characters uses Weave at all. Not even the /SR scrapper. (though she does use Tough for the 3% uniques) It's not BAD mind you, I'm just... contrary... and when I see people say how certain powers are mandatory for all builds, etc, I make characters without those powers. Only about 15 of my 40 characters use Hasten, too. I guess where I'm going with that, is Weave is not necessary. It can be helpful sure. But on a team, your Defender shouldn't be the focus of enemy attacks, and, soloing, it's quite possible to build up good defenses without it. In any case, I prefer Manuevers over Weave to spread some love to the whole team. Eight players with Weave all have 5-7% defense. Eight players with Manuvers hanging out together give each other 24-30% defense.

I like it. If there was a Knives of Artemis costume in the super packs, and it only lasted 2 hours of in-game time (like a Jetpack), I'd want several charges built up for my Claws/SR scrapper. I'm sure there's blasters who would love a PPD Hard Suit look as well and would pour influence hand-over-fist into the sink to get them.

I'm not necessarily opposed to allowing anyone to go anywhere anytime. But I have zero expectation that this would increase people coming to redside, and I say this as a redside enthusiast. Unless you completely rewrite all redside mission text, you will have a sizeable fraction of the player base who just don't ever want to set foot in the Rogue Isles. They just don't want to be the Bad Guy. Full stop. Not even in a game. Those players, no incentive or lowering of mechanical barriers will ever budge, not one iota. You also have X people who would try it, but who are immediately turned off by being treated like a lackey at low levels. They want to be Doctor Doom right out of the gate at level one, and don't like the idea of having to build up Street Cred before the missions treat you like a Big Bad. Then you have the "I would play redside if more people played redside, but people play blueside, so I play blueside" players who are caught in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. @Clave Dark 5 is right on that point. If you have a regular squad you team with a few times a week, SG or not, can be just random global friends, play blueside with them, but bring up the idea of maybe playing redside one night a week. Same way there's "Tanker Tuesday" groups, maybe see if they want to try Redside Wednesday or Redside Monday, just to shake things up a little. They may shoot the idea down fast, but you don't need hundreds of people to come over to red, just a semi-regular group you play with. Don't even really need a full group, a squad of 5 or even just a duo partner can be fun, too. Another thing, is that there's also players who do play redside, but tend to be very Lone Wolf on thier villains. Some of that is becuase of population realities, but some of it is also mental roleplay vs world. After all, if you imagine your villain to be a Big Bad who will eventually bid for world domination, then why exactly is your villain agreeing to help out my villain? etc. So some redside players may be more standoffish for those reasons.

You can fairly reliably use Aid Self in combat once your relevant Defense is in the low 40's or better. There's still no guarantee even at softcap, lucky hits will happen, but I have zero expectation to be able to use Aid Self in battle any earlier than that. Alternately, if you have Caltrops or another area-denial power, you can run through a door, break line of sight, toss Caltrops behind you at the doorway, then Aid Self while they're busy realizing that it's no fun to step on sharp things. Don't expect Aid Self to be a pool power that's just as reliable as Reconstruction or Dull Pain. It was never intended to be. As far as costing you endurance despite interrupt, well, I believe the Blaster snipes go on cooldown if you happen to be interrupted in battle. (which can happen if you start an out-of-battle snipe, and then get jumped by something else before it goes off). Would you be okay with Aid Self not costing endurance but having to wait for it come off cooldown instead? I think Aid Self is better as-is personally.

This. It's not that that hard to build up 100 mil on a character and drop it for 10 packs. Not even farming, though that will CERTAINLY do it if you have a mind to. Just play missions, do tips, story arcs etc, and save up your recipes. Craft, convert, post for sale, and before you know it you have quite a bit of inf. I don't see freebies as needed, and I'm not sure why the devs would want to hamstring one of their own big influence sinks. That said, their call, not mine, and maybe they'd like the idea.

My Mind/Kin turned several repeated wipes vs IDF into a solid win, and then we steamrolled for the rest of the night. If you're only doing a Peregrine Island radio mission vs Council marathon, okay, maybe you don't need a controller. But the nastier the foes you're up against, the more help a Controller is to the team. I focus on Malta, Carnies, Ruluaru, IDF, Awakened, Shepherds, Arachnos/Longbow, Vanguard, Animated Arcana, etc.

Despicable Me Minions. Except for the We'd-Be-Sued-Into-Oblivion aspect.

I could totally see someone buying you a case of good beer. Or some really good coffee. LOTS of people use one or the other as the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

IKR? I'm hoping I can start earning some real-life Incarnate XP. And man oh man, I want me some real-life Ouroborous. How cool would it be to flashback to like, 2019 right about now?