MTeague

I'm extremely happy with my Thugs/Traps character. As @Scarlet Shocker said, not every support set is all things to all people. Traps is not built for fast moving teams. Don't expect it to be. You are the team's "Oh Crap!" button, when there's a hard target, or when somoene accidentally aggros two extra spawns. That said, Thugs is plenty capable of just being a roaving band of destruction. The Defense your thugs will accumulate from your Enforcers, plus your Forcefield Generator, plus, if you took it, Manuevers, makes them extremely durable, even on the move. And of course, there's Gangnam War, when you want that extra oomph, or just extra targets to help distract foes. Your Thugs will work even better, holed up and making good use of your Traps. Teams generally won't wait for that outside of AV's or other kick-it-up-a-notch scenarios. Don't expect them to. Save your Traps for emergencies. Soloing though, you are a holy terror. Traps does definitely benefit from Global Recharge. Now, if I recall correctly from other threads, you (@Ultimo), typically do not use the AH, and do not use much in the way of IO's. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that point). This will be a character where you will feel that more than some others. Excessive +Recharge set bonuses are not required for /Traps to shine, but there's no denying it's particularly nice with a powerset with long recharge times. And this combo already has some powers just beggin' to be slotted with some Luck of the Gamblers. But you can just slot some recharge SO's, if that's the limit of where you want to go.

I would pick eight people who enjoy mild banter and chatting during missions.

I have to admit, I've never deliberately slotted a pet for end redux. Just gone with the Henchment IO sets or the Recharge Intensive Pets IO sets. And if End Reduction happened to be part of them, then they got exactly that much. I don't rememeber fly trap standing around doing nothing, my Plant is a Dom, so I has my entire secondary tree for direct damage. For me, the pet offtanking is what I'm really looking for.

I get that, and yet, 35 threads says there is very clearly pent-up demand. The devs are free to ignore that, of course. I find it difficult to accept that for mysterious code reasons only NPC's can grant the necessary tokens. At the end of the day, we're talking about a Boolean flag. "Affect" or "Do not Affect". It should not be beyond the possible for a YN flag under options to work in this fashion. It may not be worth it to the devs to come up with an alternate solution, but I will not accept that it is beyond their skill level to create an alternate solution that uses only a preference.

I have not used it yet, but I solo more than I team. When I do team, I'm not super choosy. If someone genuinely offends me to the point where I am actually disgusted with them, I drop team and /gignore them on the spot. But it is extremely rare that this has come up. Maybe 3 times in 4 years. People have to really be sailing far far over the line for that. For nearly all other cases, I'm easy-come-easy-go for teaming. I enjoy banter in team chat, esp for story arc or tip mission teams. Something to make it less grindy. If someone really seems like they don't know what they're doing, I'll send them a tell asking if they'd like some pointers. Usually people are glad, or at most a "nah, I'm good". If they're causing wipes and don't want advice, then I might suddenly "get a phone call I have to take" and drop team. But if they're not causing wipes, just not performing at a high level but want to figure it out themselves, OK, I got no bones with that either. I also can be a stubborn sonofbeech. If someone is quiet, but gets the job done and isn't unpleasant in any way, that's fine by me, too. I'm an introvert myself.

Plant Control says Hi. I mean, don't get me wrong. New Plant, is plenty viable. I'm re-levelling a Plant/Psi dom, and doing just fine. But it's definitely some Tennyson, "...Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,..."

I mean, egg, cheese, bacon, and bread-like substances have occasionally been known to be popular. So I can sorta see it.

My Claws/SR scrapper does not use Focus or Shockwave, because I don't like the idea of projected waves of force from the claws. I use only attacks that can concieveably be direct use of the blades. Strike, Slash, Follow Up, Spin, Eviscerate. I am aware some consider that as intentionally gimping myself. I give them permission to hold that opinion. For me, concept is of far greater import than performance. I do use Weapon Mastery epic pool for Caltrops, Web Grenade, and Shuriken to deal with runners.

Yes, but we have Fire! And pointy sticks!! And we can sweat across our entire bodies, giving us mastery of the hunt!

I've always read the pizza reaction (on most threads, as "have a slice!" / general idea of support. Whether that's the intent, could not say, and I'm sure on certain specific threads, it's used for other purposes. One must learn to read between the icons, sometimes.

Couple Additional Points: in the old days, there were also "Training Origin" (TO) enhancements. These are hot garbage. Vendor immediately if you ever encounter them. Dual Origin enhancements (DO's) were approximately twice as good as TO's. Single Origin enhancements (SO's) are approximately twice as good as DO's. so never use DO's unless you're dirt poor. both Dual Origin enhancements and Single Origin enhancements "wear out" and stop giving you benefits, if your character level is 5 or more higher than the enhancement level. example 1: at character level 25, you no longer receive any benefit from a lvl 20 or below SO or DO. example 2: at character level 30, you no longer receive any benefit from a lvl 25 or below SO or DO. however, you can use the "Upgrade" button to automatically replace SO's or DO's with a freshly-topped-off version of them. Costs influence, but is an option. Invention Origin enhancements (IO's) never wear out, ever. You can use a lvl 25 IO all the way to 50, and you always get the same benefit from it. Now you might want to replace those with more-current-level IO's in order to receive a larger benefit, but you never Have to. This can make basic IO's a cost-effective way to handle slotting as you level. You can always hover over every kind of enhancement to see what % benefits it would provide, to help you decide if it's worth buying / slotting. Hamidon Origin enhancements (HO's) exist. These are lvl 50 only (I think) and basically are two lvl 50 SO's mashed together into one. Per slot, they provide the most benefit, but only certain combinations exist, and they're not easy to come by. For now, just treat HO's as out of your price range and don't worry. Maybe look at them again when you have multiple level 50's. Invention Sets, are still basically invention IO's, but yes, they have the set bonuses if you slot multiple pieces from that set into the same power. Those set bonuses are individually fairly small. 1.8% max health. 2.5% melee defense. 6.25% global recharge. 7% accuracy to all powers. etc. But when you start having lots of these? You can become a god. You never benefit from more than 5 instances of the same set bonus, but even with that rule, these are Amazing when you have IO sets everywhere. The "Guides" section of the Forums has a few articles about enhancements, and just as importantly, some pointers on how to amass a lot of Influence. Not every method will be your cup of tea, but I do recommend browsing. In particular, this one really really helped me when I was new. Some of the exact numbers they quote are no longer quite true, but the big-picture idea still works just fine. You'll often see people refer to this method as "Converter Roulette".

I hear what you're saying, but if you ever frequented the CoH forums back on Live, remember how many one-word posts there were there, as well. Just /jranger, which had become forum shorthand for "This is a terrible idea, under no circumstances do we ever want to see anything like this, and the poster's intellect is highly suspect for that matter." Take away the reaction icons, I guaran-dam-tee you will start seeing a flood of /jranger replies, and probably a few others will be cooked up and instituted. Personally, I'd far rather keep the reaction icons, which at least eliminate that kind of chaff from the actual message streams. You can always just flat out ignore the icons if you wish. There are no settings to ignore one-word text replies, or forum replies that are just images/meme's, etc. Be careful what you wish for.

I get it may be percieved as "Very Low Priority; Workaround Already Exists". But I would hope exposing the toggle as another line item in the UI would be ... really tame. Granted, standard code rant applies, I have not personally reviewed the code, so perhaps it would be a beast. But usually adding a toggle or YN prompt to a screen isn't that that traumatic.

What if I don't want Dillo freed from his *hoorb* addiction? Is there another option to donate to @Snarkythat can help the one who is Dillo maintain his *hoorb* ness?

Super Stunners do a PBAE endurance drain. When one drops, or is just about to, RUN. Let ranged finish it off. If you're not in range, it will not drain you. EDIT: also, a number of powers can mitigate end drain. Fire Armor / Consume should be pre-emptively popped for end drain attacks. Electric Armor / Static Shield is really good against endurance drain. Energy Aura / Dampening Field gives endurance drain resistance Force Field / Insulation Shield gives endurance drain resistance. Electrical Affinity / Faraday Cage gives endurance drain resistance if you stand within it Electrical Affinity / Energizing Circuit can directly feed you more endurance. Kinetics / Speed Boost increases your recovery, and lets you GTFO from the PBAE faster. Empathy / Recovery Aura would be available to Defenders (and Corrupters if they're exemplared down) Storm Summoning / O2 Boost gives endurance drain resistance. Marine Affinity / Torodial Bubble gives endurance drain resistance, and +Recovery. Nature Affinity / Lifegiving Spores can feed you endurance. Radiation Emission / Accelerate Metabolism gives good +Recovery. and of course, all players can hang onto Blue inspirations. I really think adequate tools exist to handle it.

I have a grand total of thirty two characters right now. I may create more. But I deliberately level them slowly, and I tend to create a 1,000 character backstory for each one, and mentally lump them into hypothetical buckets in the event of a Final Cataclysmic Showdown between my Heroes and my Villains (even figureing out which ones my goldsiders will eventually go with). I over-the-top OCD them, trying to keep an equal number of origins, equal number of archtypes, in each bucket, and for the first 31, without any duplication of powersets at all. But if i have one skill in life, just one.... it's overthinking things. 😆

Keep in mind, it's not that that hard to get an extra +21% accuracy to all powers just as a freebie by slotting other IO sets. You may not Need all your acc bonuses to come from a given slotting directly in that power. Also, there's Tactics, and Build Up, and Defense Debuffs, and other ways to make sure you're fairly reliably hitting. And also keep in mind, the dreaded "natural 1" / occasional manifestation of XCOM accuracy. Sometimes you just gonna miss.

I don't think it needs to be removed. But neither would I miss it if it were gone. I do think it would be good if some macro / bind templates were more easily locateable by new players, but, at the end of the day you can't make people come to forums, and you can't make them read the wiki.

To be fair, there is often fierce competition for that title. In both directions. CoH isn't perfect, no game is. I think it does much, much, more right than wrong. And I think the HC devs have done an awesome job, given their constraints. Not flawless, but again, so very very much more right than wrong. But every single player is going to have some critiques. And some wish list items. And "one man's trash is another man's treasure", still applies. I've seen what I'm sure are heartfelt requests for changes people truly believe will improve things that horrify me. I'm sure the changes I want to make would have people slapping me around. But anyone who was there for live, is an adult now, and for many of us, retirement may even slowly be coming into view. We ought to have moderate adulting skillz. We should be able to take a few grains of salt (unless contraindicated by your physician...), take some deep breaths, and not let anyone's requests/opinions get to us. Even if it seems near incomprehensible to us, people probably mean exactly what they post ... probably... and in any case, it's not worth back and forth arguments that can only end in a flamewar.

1) teaming is entirely optional: I spent far too many years on the endless treadmill of World of Warcraft raiding, and the absolute necessity to bend your schedule to work with 24 other people to get anything done. That's not the case in CoH. You certain can team, can form regular teams, join supergroups, and all that if you wish. But you never have to, and you can still do an awful lot of content and have a great time. 2) there are no contested drops: Again, Warcraft raid bosses would drop 2-3 pieces of random loot when defeated, to be divvied up among 25 people. There was nearly always loot drama, with people thinking things were "against them" if they couldn't walk away with a coveted piece of loot. No matter how much people tried to mitigate that with point systems based on attendence and suchnot, someone would always get bent out of shape when someone else got a coveted rare drop that was best-in-slot. By contrast, in CoH, the game itself always directly assigns your rewards to you. This prevents So Goddam Much Drama it's not even funny. 3) the people: Perhaps precisely because there's nothing to fight over, nothing to get worked up over, people who play CoH tend to be fairly easy-going, helpful, and willing to assist other players get oriented. 4) No treadmill: One last Warcraft comparison. Darn near every other MMO, the level cap is raised every expansion, and to keep players going for that brass ring, even top of the line gear from the prior expansion suddenly turns into liquid manure compared to even the most basic drop in the new expansion. The goalposts always move. Again and again and again. The designers of other MMO's, by design, always take all your effort, crumple it up before you, dump it into a trash can, and light it on fire. By design. Most MMO's are designed to suck hours out of you in endless grinding because that keeps the monthly fees going. You can only do that for so long before you snap. Conversely, In City of Heroes, the level cap is 50. It has been for so long that I often forget that there were a handful of early issues at live launch where that was not true. You can maintain as few or as many alts as you like in CoH, without being under constant pressure to keep your "main" characters current with the best gear from the current expansion.

Archery / Tactical Arrow blaster should not be overlooked. Ice/Ice blasters are really good, too.

I was casually interested in Ship of Heroes during the Snap. But as with most "spiritual successors", they never seemed to materialize. If they FINALLY do have a product... um... sorry, no. I have CoH back, thanks.

Sometimes it's the little things. I'd like this as well.

Massive astigmatisms.

I would restrict Incarnate powers to iTrials, or to arcs like new Dark Astoria that were designed around them, only. No, that will never happen. But the question was asked, so, that's what I'd change, if anyone were fool enough to hand me a magic wand.