MTeague

Still very happy with my Spines / Regen stalker. I will admit, I do /pout sometimes that I don't actually get Quick Recovery as a stalker. But he's an absolute beast for single target or AE. I have zero hesitation zooming ahead of the tank and opening up on a pile of mobs with BU/Throw Spines / Ripper / tab and AS something / maybe a couple single target stabs and repeat. The toxic is very nice even if it's just the dot part of the damage. In the mid-30's I have no hesitation acting as team tank if we don't happen to have a real tank. I know I'll end every fight at max health and endurance anyway, and i've done some serious goal-line stands with him when the rest of the team has wiped. Lvls 11-20 got a little rough when the slotting just wasn't there quite yet, but he's matured quite well.

or VuJa De

I like the caves as they are. But I also enjoy travelling across the various outdoor maps. And I don't speedrun pretty much anything.

for non-card drops, I admit I've never bought a single Unslotter, because I still have a few hundred from opening packs. I've still got an extra 30+ respecs on tap in my email as well. getting Brain Storm ideas in bulk can be nice. My personal base salvage racks are stocked with rare salvage because I'll let them pile up to 400-600 brain storm ideas at a time, then crunch them all into rare salvage. can scoop up some Boosters / Catalysts on the side, but you're not going to get them in BULK unless you're buying a gazillion packs. the Candy Canes are nice in the winter packs. I don't have all the Winter Event Badges yet. I wish I could vendor/sell the Tailor Tokens. I'll NEVER use them. Ever. Not until I get all the tailor badges anyway. the inspirations are "meh" at best to me.

I wouldn't use it on a Stalker. On a stalker it's too important to me to *know* when I'm hidden or not, and I don't want to have to flick my eyes up to my buff list, searching. The visual indicator of my character being stealthed is exactly right. I would definitely use it for both my Dark Miasma and Storm Summoning characters. The "Team Stealth" is nice, and I love the extra defense from them, but they're ALWAYS ON, unless I've been detoggled, and they have their own other slight graphic effects even beyond my character being transparent. On them, I'd certainly appreciate the option to say "no, just show me to me".

to the best of my knowlege it has absoluetely zero impact.

Controllers: The harder the content, the more use you are. Peregrine Isle Radio missions focusing on Council? Snoozefest. You'll barely feel needed on a Controller. Toss some buffs around, that's about it. Try not to be too obvious about tabbing out and reading Google News. Malta or Carnies or Rularuu? Now we're talking. People will be glad for lockdown / CC's. Awakened or Vanguard or IDF? Even more so. I was in a Night Ward group on my Sentinel, on a melee and blasty team with one Empath Defender, six level 50's. We were getting our heads HANDED to us on several door missions. Repeated wipes it wasn't even close they were tearing us new ones. I said "I'll be right back. You don't need my Sentinel for this. Let me load up my Mind/Kin" We Roflstomped those same missions the rest of the night. Just stopping X many mobs from doing incoming damage via Holds/Confuses, stopping 2nd waves from adding with Mass Hypnosis, and making sure the Empath had status protection of her own (Gogo Increase Density) completely changed the entire equation.

you do what you need to for your concept, but I don't see Blazing Arrow or Explosive Arrow as "theme breakers". Your character is a normal human. You have some wonderful toys in your quiver, that's all. Batman has a bunch of nifty gadgets too, but no one says he's "actually technology origin". My $0.02 USD, anyway. I can't advise on some of hte higher lvl powers, since my Arch/Tac Arrow is only lvl 21 at the moment. However Glue Arrow is ASTONISHINGLY good damage mitigation. Many mobs want to get out of the glue patch and will give you multiple free hits while they do so. And when a Boss or some particularly nasty Lt's get a melee fixation on you, you can zip across your own glue patch, repeatedly kiting them through it. They may take occasional pot-shots at you with a pistol, but you'll take FAR less damage than if they'd actually been able to melee you. Flash Arrow isn't anything super-fancy, but it's nice. You get the option to bypass some fights with it, and -5% to hit on a group of enemies is kinda like giving yourself +5% defense. Ice Arrow, very nice to park a Lieut while you deal with a Boss. Not strong enough mag to hold a boss by itself. however, I'm not sure if Ice Arrow is just a bridge too far for you for character concept. exploding arrow as an grenade tipped arrow isn't too unreasonable, but something that forms a solid block of ice 2 feet thick around your target, I dunno. It's REALLY effective though. optinally can slot with Damage Proc's out the wazoo may find it's better to slot with Hold Duration / and once correct lvl the Lockdown +2 mag hold piece to park bosses when you're soloing. You're a blaster. Fighting "Fair" is for Tanks who can't die anyway. Blazing Arrow is a very nice DoT The Snipe is wonderful. Take the Snipe. Love the Snipe.

Eh. It only costs in-game influence, not real-life monies, and it's not hard to pile up a hundred mil a week (Honestly, I think that's a *very* modest figure.) with even part-time marketeering for a half hour a couple times a week. I don't mind it staying right as it is. I will admit I did used to wonder how people ever afforded them back when I was levelling up my first characters and hadn't learned of the glorious awesomeness that are Enhancement Converters.

I would be fine with the all Self-Rez's have an alternate "If you activate while still alive....." effect. I do think they should still retain their "If you activate while dead...." as at LEAST a fallback option. I know there is a desire out there for an auto-firing Cheat Death. I do think that would be an interesting mechanic, but I'm reluctant to embrace the idea outright as an across the board change for all existing sets.

See, I never understood why the crash was removed from Blast T9's in the first place. Money or no money. I didn't consider the crash a bad thing. ** is dragged kicking and screaming off to the side by swarms of angry Blasters, Defenders, and Corruptors and clubbed like a baby seal ** No, really, ** is clubbed some more ** I kinda liked Full Auto being weaker-but-crashless as a tradeoff, and I remember the game being a lot more tactical when you couldn't melt everything in one button every other spawn. Now, I have ZERO expectations that that will EVER be reverted. But regardless of whether that happened on HC or in the last year or so of LIVE when I was off playing other games, I just feel like it should be pointed out that "If blasters have crashless T9's, than so should everyone else" can be balanced out in more than one direction.

x4 or x8 you can end up with multple sappers. Or you can just not realize there was one hiding in the back until after he got lucky and tagged you. It happens. I'm not always super careful about pre-scanning for sappers when I play my /SR specficallky because I expect them to miss the VAST majority of the time.

I took Elude on my Claws/SR scrapper. Crash and all. I will go hours without needing it. But if a Sapper rolls two natural 20's in a row and gets through her 52% defense, Elude gives me a nice "Too Bad, I still have Sky-High Defenses EVEN IF you detoggled me, and I'll still murdalize *cough* arrest *cough* every last one of you!". The fact that it comes with it's own built in high boosts to Recovery, in addition to instantly putting me at softcap even if I detoggled, makes it worth it to me for emergencies. Now, yes, once I pop it, I'll be dealing with a crash 3 minutes later. It hasn't been a problem. I have a decent judge of time for how long it took me to win whatever fight I was in, and if I don't think I have enough time left over for the next spawn, I just go grab a drink, then come back and turn my toggles back on after the crash has happened. Would I like it even better without the crash? Ab-so-lutely. Do I think the crash is really that traumatic a thing to deal with? No, not at all.

at least on males the "average citizen" template defaults to normal leg lengths proportional to the rest of the body. (at least, what I believe to be normal anyway....) the "heroic" template across the board have crazy long default lengths for legs, though.

Hit another one today, from Mr. G on redside: "Splice is technological mastermind and has the moral compass of a brick, just like a brick."

I'm not sure the planet can contain the amount of Rage that would be generated if Blizzard took down WoW for half a Saturday. Much less the "Screw that noise, I'm not working Saturday either...." angle.

Agreed completely. Before IO's existed, I only had ONE character with Hami-O's, and even he didnt' have many. Everything else was SO's on every character. So for the most part, I would drag up the handful of Hami-O's (if I had any) to the "don't kill me tray", and then let ALL my other SO's remain in the bottom bucket, where they would be automatically vendored, and then I'd just go visit Ghost Falcon and buy new SO's. With IO's, they don't vendor anyway, and if they did, it still wouldn't be anywhere near what the AH would pay for them for, and the hassle of losing any of them and replacing them is very real. So it's very careful management and triple checking that yes, I do have everything saved off into one of my trays.

@Gulbasaur I feel like there should be a "What the Cluck" power in the MM set. Maybe rename "Hurricane Cluck"?

Queen's "One Vision" all makes sense to me now! I had no idea Freddy Mercury was so foresighted.

My experiences are similar to@Six Six's. I sort of fell into "build resists now, defense later"... and looked at my slotting at lvl 47 and realized there isn't going to BE a "later". I've got Smashing/Lethal Resist at 59% with a few slots more to place. Fire Resist at 75% and so overcapped it's not funny. Due to respec and see about rebalancing this. Cold Resist at 37%, Energy/Neg Resists at 58%. Psi Resist at 26% and I'm looking at a respec to build more /Psi, I'd like to toss in 3 Impervium Armor uniques (already have full Aegis) to patch that hole. 2 for sure, but Ideally 3. Toxic is only 20% or so, but if I know I'm facing lots of Toxic I can just set Healing Flames to autocast and suddenly it's at 50%. Worth it for Hydra maps, or facing Toxic Taran's. Cauterizing Flames is extremely good maintenece heals, well worth six slotting. Healing Flames is a GIANT heal and comes back pretty fast. If you're also rockin' a Panacea proc and a Power Transfer proc, maybe an Entropic Chaos proc, and you tend to use Defensive Opportunity rather than Offensive? There's green numbers all around you all the time. Having Defenses of only 11-17%... and yes that is WITH both 3% uniques.... or so is a serious mindbleep. But it hasnt' been a problem. I don't even notice it when Council mobs swarm me with machine guns or chainguns and rip my defense to shreds. Eventually it dawned on me that what I have, isn't unlike a /Regen character who had stacked Resists instead of Defense. I have zero problem soloing +2x4 maps just diving straight into piles of mobs and melting them all down around me. I use Burn a lot, and Fireball is often cast at point blank range, and couple steps backpedal for Fire Breath, then tank out the rest. I use Cremate and Fire Cages from Fire Mastery. I almost never die. Now, true, I said +2x4, not +4x8, but I'm also not 50 or incarnated yet. It still means I'm swarmed by a ton of mobs when soloing and I just burn them down and press on. I never run out of End anymore, and honestly, I end most fights at full health and full end. My villain still FEELS like he's earned his stripes. Now. Are there specific mobs that give me a Bad Day? Oh yea. Some standard can-openers. Sappers: we do not like the Sappers, Sam I Am. Consume will let me replenish SOME, but I'm careful to identify the sappers BEFORE I dive into a pile of Malta, and they get Blazing Bolt as an opener for the Hold effect and Ragdoll. Then I murdalize them before they can stand back up. Carnies, Ring Mistresses. That Touch of Vitae is an evil horrible nasty wasty debuff. Tarantula Mistresses / Fortunada Mistresses, the Psi hurts us, nassssssty hobbits! First Ward / Awakened: They will beat me up and do unspeakable things to me and take my lunch money. They're even more Bursty Psi Damage than the Arachnos. Still. with a respec, if I can work in another 18% or so Psi Resist, those last two groups will be much less offensive. But I also don't really care about Devouring Earth with the +To-Hit generators. My defense wasnt' that good in the first place, and my resists are not impacted. I still burn them down out of habit, but mobs with high +to-hit aren't that big a deal, comparitively. Rularuu eyeballs are also not that big of a deal to him.

I would like to see Sonic Blast and/or Sonic Resonance have some OPTIONAL animation changes, borrowing from the Talons Of Vengeance / Sirens, where the animation and sound effect are more musical.

This. So much this. This is also why I completely disagree with "Force Fields are useless at endgame". No they are not. I'm quite sure the support crew with Force Fields, Cold Domination, and Empathy, and of course your VEATS, probably prevent cascade failure deaths on a regular basis, each night, every night, by paadding the defense of their team to the point where the baddies start needing an Improbability Drive to start cascade failure on characters who DON'T have /SR levels of Defense Debuff Resistance. People still may perceive them as useless because of the all-too-human tendancy to "Of course they didn't hit me! I'm just that awesome", instead of "Of course they didn't hit me! Props to my buffers!". But I am always glad to see any such defense contributing characters on a team.

My knees are no longer medically capable of doing a jig, I am sort of looking forward to levelling my Elec/Elec Dominator though. He's been on the backlog for awhile.

I'll say this much. When I'm writing a character bio? I'll use any words I want, and if those words supposedly mean somthing different in "in game lore"? Then in game lore can BITE me. CoH-Verse mirrored enough of our world that's it's entire plausible Requiem has both meanings, and people just distinguish which is meant by context clues. Can I prove that? No. Can you prove otherwise? No. And either way, I'd say as writer of a bio, my headcanon supersedes anything I damn well please it to supersede. How anyone else wants to react to it, is something I would view as their problem.