MTeague

I suppose any ticks > 0 are better than not having an interface power slotted at all, but that's interesting. It does make me wonder if the 25% chance to debuff, 75% chance to DoT options are better than the 75% chance to debuff, 25% chance to DoT options.

That may depend on the powersets in question. I love my Mind/Kintroller. He can march onto almost any map with 0 charges of bubblegum, and just kick ass. Malta? Sure. Carnies? Bring it. Nemesis? Let's rock. Knives of Artemis? Okey-Dokey. Admittedly, it may be a slower slog if he's exemplared under lvl 33... Fulcrum Shift makes a gigantic difference. But he's about half-way through the grand tour of Flashbacking it all, and no speedbumps of any kind. But if he's faced with a full Archvillian, it's not in the cards. EB's he can mop up. An AV... no. Transfusion isn't a big enough -Regen debuff. If he has to fight an AV, he's teaming, or he's making a trip out to Bloody Bay for a Shivan Shard. Probably not something a /Rad or /Dark or /Traps would need to do.

My first dominator is Plant / Psi and... honestly I have trouble getting into another Dom (trying a Grav / Earth) because I can't help but compare them and he feels like he will never ever measure up to the godlike destruction of the Plant / Psi. Kinda spoiled myself.

Tip missions can be more villianous... they do try to live up to the moral choice aspect more there. There's always AE if you want to craft some arcs of your own. Yes, you will know what to expect from your own arc, but really you know what to expect from most arcs if you remmber them from Live, or played them on alts already. Mayhems are good for stompy destruction and wanton murder of civilians. It is true that often your agency is quite limited and you can only pick from pre-designed choices which might be nothing like YOUR CHARACTER would actually react in that situation. I mean, the Doc Graves arc, I would have murdered the lot of them long before anyone.... noteworthy.... showed up. And if maybe that means a certain individual would ahve stomped MY character flat, well, maybe. But I wouldn't have known it at the time. I would have just gotten sick of Doc Graves blathering on about a "faceless benefactor" when I was sure he was lying thorugh his teeth, and Omnicore snarling at me like a rabid chihuahua and just said "oh HELL with this" and done my level best to destroy them, if the game could let me do anything. And sure, Weston Phipps lets you be really monstrous, but that's just being super evil to help out someone ELSE. It's not really the same thing as your character building up the resoures to establish your own Moonbase Laser to ransom Paragon City for ONE MILLION DOLLARS! I'm not being a villian to be an Arachnos lackey, I'm being a villian to be a villian for ME, you know? But of course, you don't have that kind of freedom. It's a game. Your choices are programmed by what developers thought of between 7 and 15 years ago (give or take). This isn't a moddable sandbox game. It's never going to be, not outside of AE anyway.

And let us not forget in EverQuest, if you died, you respawned with zero gear, completely defenseless, and had to run back to the exact spot where you died to get your gear of your corpse. And you lost XP each time you died. Not debt. XP was SUBTRACTED from your total upon each death. And if you died enough, you could LOSE A LEVEL. And you only respawned at the place you last got a bind. How many people remember XP'ing up in Kunark, only to have a group wipe, where the barbarian says... says "ah crap... I'm still bound in Halas"? (meaning, you ain't gonna see him for at LEAST an hour) Every MMO since then I've never really been able to take death that seriously. Most of them, death is now a minor inconvenience, barely a speedbump.

The one change I simply could not play the game without ever again? Ouroborous. And NOT for the convienent teleport. Take that away, I wouldn't care much. I actually don't mind travel time, even if that makes me a heretic. But I need that Pillar of Ice and Flame with the mission list. Prior to that, outlevelling content just HURT when you're an OCD completionist. And there was really no way around it. You were GOING TO outlevel content no matter what you did. So then I started plotting out which alts would focus on which zones, so that I'ld still get to see all the content just some on different characters. Being able to flashback and do it all on your main... godsend.

Heroic Thugs, conceptually, could work in a scenario where the police themselves were the bad guys, or where the police were good guys but so overwhelmed they just couldn't handle crime in an area. And then you have a gang forming together saying "Ok, the police can't / won't protect you, so WE WILL.", dealing out Street Justice on an as-needed basis. In the real world of course, any group that started out with such motives would probably become drunk on power and the notion of being answerable to no-one, and then becoming the very danger they tried to protect against. Human nature is a pain like that. But... really.... in a city with 10,000+ superheroes and paramilitary groups like Longbow... it's a HECK of a lot harder to justify such a group forming.

i do drop Siphon Power when I get Fulcrum Shift. But I miss it, terribly. I don't drop it because I think it's useless. I drop it because on Mind/Kin, it's Very hard to skip enough primary and secondary powers to fit in pool powers that I want... and I *still* don't have all of them, even at 50. It's just a question of what's the least bad choice.

Yea. Whether Super Pack or Winter Packs, I do not buy less than 6 at once. And I try to buy 8-10 at once, just to smooth out the duds, because invariably, there WILL be some duds. I usually get enough out of 10 packs to keep 4 ATO's/Winter O's, post any others I got for sale, and post the Unslotters, Boosters (I flashback a lot and don't care much about them), etc for sale. I don't always get back my full purchase price on the super/winter packs from what I auction. But it's usually upwards of 80% of the purchase price. Brainstorm Ideas pile up in mail until I get like 400+ of them and shazam them all into a bunch of rare salvage to dump into my SG base. Dual Inspirations / Team Inspirations I use for my alts. The MM's get dibs on Team Inspirations. I wish I could hand out the respecs I get from packs, they just pile up and I never respec so much that I need to draw on them.

Adjusting incentives is dicey at best. Like if they gave 25% more inf and merits for redside content for a month to see what impact that had, etc. such wailing and gnashing of teeth you'd see from people who'd feel forced to change sides, even if it were entirely optional. I still don't know how much impact it would have. Some of it, I'm sure is people play blue because people play blue and they want teams so they go where people already are, and all other concersn be damned. But some of it, probably, more people may just enjoy being heroic over villainous. Even if it's harmless villainy in a computer game against pixels that don't hurt anyone real. I mean people may feel that villains are Cooler Than Heroes (ie, Darth Vader vs Obi Wan, Doctor Doom over Mr Fantastic, Magneto vs Cyclops or Prof X, ). But that doesnt' necessarily mean people want to PLAY the villain or BE the villain. I like some of each, and have 12 blue, 12 red, and 6 gold. But my impression is that's RARE, and I doubt it's ALL because of teaming. So is it really worth trying to dangle carrots in front of someone to get them do what maybe they just don't want to do?

Now I want a 2 foot tall Assault Bot that looks like a CL4P-TP unit that's screaming at Jack he's totally going to teabag him.

My Mind/Kin was a very reliable (if slow at first) leveller. Status effects were rarely an issue; I locked down anyone who could Hold/Stun me before they could use those powers. (One reason I really liked Teleknesis levelling up... an extra auto-hit hold, plus the single target hold, pretty much wallops even a boss, before they could lock me down. for the crowds, I had a non-aggroing single target Confuse that I could use at sufficient range they didn't even see me use it, and I had an AE and single target sleep. It was not hard to methodically work my way through them until none remained. Tedious yes, but not hard. The picture changed SIGNIFICANTLY as he levelled up enough to use the Lockdown Chance for +2 Mag Hold and slotted that in both his AE hold (damn near guaranteed to proc) and his single target hold (it's not a unique proc), and of course as he got Fulcrum Shift added to his toolkit, suddenly his damage SPIKED. Regular status protection is still very sweet, don't get me wrong. But there's more than one way to work around it.

Oh man that's gotta hurt. I mean, on one hand, it's not .... that that hard to get the 100 million back... even if you're not a farmer, a couple rounds of converter roulette (1/2 hour to buy, craft, and convert?) and a day or two patience on the AH will get a lot of it back... maybe all. But I would still be /headdesk

I have a Beast / Empathy MM who may only have one epic power total. blueside / committed hero, so Patron Pools are just flat out. Don't care if they might have better powers. They're OFF the table for this character. character concept isn't fire/ice/frost, so that's three ancillary pools out the window. leaves her just Field Mastery, and in there, I can justify Temp Invulnerabilty... and nothing else. So for a what the hell, I'm making her a Kickboxing Empath, who charges right in with her pets and uses Boxing, Kick, and Cross Punch, along with all three Leadership toggles, and some Fly powers. I'll still have most of the Empath powers, and keeping buffs up and healing where required will be more important than cross punching for great justice but... what the heck. I'll see how it works because the other choices aren't doing it for me. On the plus side, I know my pets will be in range of all the pet aura IO's.

Wrestlers. T3 pet, would absolutely HAVE TO be reminscient of Andre the Giant.

Alternately, maybe the exact same sets, but some alternate "skins"? Like... Ninjas you could have traditional Genin / Jounin / Oni, OR, some Knives of Artemis? Still melee + ranged assassins, but different look and feel to the set. Thugs you could have standard Punk / Enforcers / Bruiser, OR, some Family for a differnent flavor of Gang and Gang War? Robots, maybe an alternate set of Council Hoverbots / MechMen / Warcry? gotta be something we could come up with from the list of existing enemies who already have all necessary artwork that would kind of fit the existing themes.

Cops. PPD / security guards for T1. PPD Equalizers or perhaps Shells for T2 PPD Hard Suit for T3. Maybe some melee powers with a nightstick for direct attacks?

Consider /Cold for a secondary. You get Ice Shields to boost defense similar to FF bubbles, but you get a fair array of debuffs in the set, too. You just have to deal wtih teh fact that your ninjas are encased in 6 inches to a foot of ice and still kicking people offside the head. /Time, I've heard nothing but praises of. I have a Time/Energy Defender who I'm going to solo through most of 1-20 Praetoria someday, but so far I haven't DONE anything wth the set. It does sound like you'll want to get quite a few procs for Time though. /Rad or /Poison would boost your minion survival from the other angle. By kittenizing your foes. Debuff your foe to-hit to the floorboards, and they'll just whiff against your ninjas. However, keeping your ninjas on a tighter leash would become more important, since if they follow someone outside of the debuff rage, they will *NFL CRUNCH sounds* pay the price! /Thermal gives you a mix of heals and resist shields, and later on some damage boosting and strong debuffs. It will do nothing to help your minions softcap defense, but, a mix of moderate defense (from Pet Aura IO's) and moderate resists and maintenence heals can get the job done.

I'm quite happy with my Ninja/Cold. Ice Shields and the Pet Aura IO's help keep them standing long enough to unleash their damage.

"A man's got to know his limitations.", however. I do remmber, in early City of Villians, lvl 12-15 or so, groups wanting my Ninjas/Poison MM to send in his Ninjas to soak every alpha. For an 8 man group, with no one healing anyone, just blasting away, vs +4 mobs. All that accomplished to give me massive debt badges. Damn near every other pull I ended up using a wakie. Maybe other people got good exp from it? I sure as heck didn't. This was before IO's existed however. And back then, /Poison was single-target-only for it's early debuffs. At that point, with those tools, against those enemies? What the group wanted was simply unreasonable, and I should have quit out long before I did. I had an iffy combo to begin with, and paper thin pets with not NEARLY enough defense who were going to crumple like tissue paper against a crowd. However, today? A reborn Ninja / Cold mastermind, using 3 Pet Aura IO's and encasing my pets in Ice Shields? That's a very very very different story, and I'd have no hesitation sending my pets in now.

If only it were possible to use CL4P-TP units.

I think Doctor Aeon has some Alternative Energy sources that are worth looking into.

You're free to view it that way. I say it's a cookie *I* baked, and just haven't eaten it *yet*. Maybe you can play 14 hours a day. I play a few nights a week, a few hours a night. I have one 50, one 39, one 30, five or six in the 20's, and yes, a handful of alts (5-6?) who are still level 1. I would not be opposed to a solution where multiple people could use a name, SO LONG AS, it's identifiable who is who. I don't want someone else being a jerk to reflect poorly on me, and if I happen to lose my cool one evening, I don't want it reflecting on someone else. But as long as the game is setup that there can be only one? Then yes, I'm going to keep the names for characters who I'm going to play.

Hm. Seems to me I have a few alts who I'm going to want to level to 6 real soon now.

I hear you. My Main, Cygnus-X1, a Mind/Kin, is recreated exactly as he was on live. Even taking two individual power choices that are situational at best, because that's how he was on live. I would have him no other way. But I had a real conundrum for one of my villians, Hephaesto. His character concept is all "metallic" wherever you would see skin, because he's no longer human. He was tossed into the Hell Forge along with some SuperScienceStuff, and (much handwaving here) was transformed into a being of Living Steel and Fire. He no longer has flesh, or blood, or pity. Only steel and fire. On live, he was a Fire / Thermal corruptor, because I wanted him to THROW fire, not use Fire Swords. But I was never happy with how squishy he was as a Corruptor. Now of course, he's a Fire / Fire Sentinel, and he's FAR truer to the original concept I had for him. I wasn't sure how well I'd like him as a Sentinel becuase he wouldn't be the SAME as he was on live. but, for me, it worked out quite well, and I'm keeping the new one and not looking back. As far as Rathstar, that's up to you. Only you can tell you which one is the real deal. If you wanted you could bridge the gap by headcanoning the "new" Rathstar to be "Son of Rathstar" or something, who took over his dad's suit when he retired (if he's Tech Based), or inherited similar powers (if Mutant), etc. Wouldn't be unreasonable to keep literally the same name if he's stepping into the others shoes.