MTeague

Are you refusing to use Seeds of Confusion or something? taht would greatly boost your kill speed and overall XP per time, eve if your XP per kill dipped a small %.

There's always the story arc where you get Vahzilok plague and are surrounded by flies buzzing around you. Chicks dig that, pretty sure. 😱

They may pickup the habit at low levels, using Immobilize as a form of damage mitigation. Sure, an immobilized mob can still shoot you, but they can't WHOMP you with that sledgehammer or that giant razorblade the size of a car that the Lost use for a sword. Endgame? ... I could see it as a certain amount of "god dammit I'm gonna do something" to feel more useful before the someone wallops the pack with a Blaster Nuke or a Judgement Nuke. It's *really* frustrating in the late 40's when you can feel 100% CARRIED the entire time. At least to me. I *loathe* the idea of being a leech or coasting and letting someone else do all the work, and after too many groups where everything is blown up before I can get a couple single target holds or a confuse in place, I'll say screw it and solo my way the rest of the way to 50. But if someone didn't want to solo, they may be trying to cram in some casts before everything is blown up.

I think, at lvl 50, a Fire/Fire tank could be squishy if you completely ignore IO's. But really, my Fire/Fire sentinel is starting to feel really tanky and his resists aren't nearly up to what an actual tank can have. One thing I have noticed with Fire Armor, at least on the Sentinel, is they get lots of resist and some decent heals, but, zero Defense of any kind, and a big hole to Psionic Resist, and a modest hole to Toxic. So I would plan your build around that, slotting specifically to patch both of those holes. Look for set bonuses that give you +Defense, or +Psi/Toxic resist, and ideally both. If it fits in your budget, get both of the +3% defense to all uniques, and the +5% resist all unique from Shield wall, and the Scaling Resist Unique from Reactive Defenses (has a min of 3% resist all). If it doesn't fit in your budget, still get them, just not right away. Keep track of your influence, keep track of your merits, and keep playing. At some point, you will be able to afford them, even if not right away. Properly slotted, the character will be like night and day.

Hey! Keep your paws off Mass Confusion, I love that power. I'm fine if an additional power that's mutually exclusive with it is added to Mind Control, but don't be messin with my fav toy.

No matter the power, there's someone out there already using it who would be upset if it were removed and just as upset if he were forced to take the other one on his next respec. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It doesn't matter if one is clearly better than the other. Swapping it will screw up someone. Adding choices that no one has to take and can be done either way, is vastly better than just swapping which power is a forced choice at lvl 1.

I could see it for some things like ForceFields as a secondary for a corruptor, if I have no interest in *ever* using Personal Force Field. Or someone with /Storm as a secondary who didn't want to have to take Gale (though I love Gale on my Storm def, slotted wtih KB to KD...).

It adds consumes extra characters somehow when you go back and edit. It's a royal pain, but you can get a lot of space back if you go into an edited bio and delete out ALL spaces between 1st and 2nd word, then manually add one single space, then delete all spaces between 2nd and 3rd word, then manually add one single space, etc. I've carved back like 200 characters this way that were falsely being consumed sometimes.

I like the idea of keeping existing bio short, but having a "Read More" button of some kind to a place where the player can add lots more text for their character. Of course, full disclosure, for any bethesda game, the "Journal" mods are the most absolute must-haves for me. My characters bio *will* expand to consume the available space lol.

Plant/Psi dominator just annihilates things. It's a glorious chaotic scene of carrion creepers, fly trap, roots, pyschic shockwaves and drain pysche. Mind/Kin controller may not clear maps super fast, but it a fun combo, at least for me. It doesn't matter what he's faced with. Malta, Carnies, Nemesis, Rikti, Arachnos, whatever. Bring it. Maybe he looks like a feeble old man in a hat and mask, but he'll kick an awful lot of butt. Or, subcontract it out to his confuse targets, as the case may be. Claws / SR scrapper is not exactly anything new or shiny but Scrapperlock while humming "can't touch this" is kinda fun 🙂 Fire / Fire Sentinel has been a lot of fun. He's not the most optimal combo, but is terribly satisfying. Plays like an AE heavy scrapper (fireball, firebreath, burn, inferno is a lot of AE) and still quite durable, without any Fire Sword animations. (all power to you if you like Fire Sword, but it's never been my thing)

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.