Snakebit

April 4

April 2

I have one in the high 30s, so...

The pet is actually terrible. It's AI relies on you spamming attacks, it misses too much, it's cones don't line up. You can hold a Tsoo sorcerer in place with the ST hold for 3 minutes and the pet will do nothing. I respec'd out. I would classify this as one of the very worst T9 primary powers available.

The conic nature of the primary doesn't mesh well with the need to be at melee for several of the sonic powers. The ST blasts and the cone are great, but the PBAOE and melee just don't fit. I like symph a lot, I like sonic a lot. I will play this toon to 50 and keep it because I like the concept, but it would be easy to build a better dominator and I think controllers actually benefit more from the primary.

April 1

22 hours ago, temnix said:

Well, there are other ways to raise money, as the others here have said. And if you want to go to auctions, that's a possibility. *I* wouldn't want to go near them for the reason that any in-game economics are such a horrible boring waste of time that no person mindful of the real world will want to touch them. My advice is not for min-maxers or nerds of any sort. It is for people who want to play the game without being dragged down by the unavailability of the things necessary to play it with enjoyment. You get those points, you spend them on SO, you never think twice about money. And you will still little by little accumulate enough to buy little toys like a flying disc or an extra Prestige power, down the line. Everything else that matters is either in your Archetype or in your power of imagination.

What are the available items in the game? Icons. Completely abstract abilities that don't usually even have a sound associated with them. Converters, whatever. You want to waste your life learning this great science? Read a book instead. However, I want to add a caveat to my post. SO are not available for Merit Reward points early on. I don't know when they become available, but not at level 10. Archetype Enhancements are there, but not SO. Perhaps they need to be unlocked somehow, but I don't think I have done anything special to make them available to me at (under) level 30.

To anyone new that is confused by the thread or the post.

This is bad advice.

Here's why:

Quote

*I* wouldn't want to go near them for the reason that any in-game economics are such a horrible boring waste of time that no person mindful of the real world will want to touch them

It took me less than an hour to buy all the recipes, salvage, craft, and slot a fresh respec at level 50 to go from IOs to set IOs. I built a toon that would require spending about 150m for all the enhancements. When I started crafting, I had 150m inf. When I finished slotting the toon, I had about 45m. I spent about 120 converters which are 60k each if you go with "buy now" prices instead of waiting on lower bids. But I didn't spend any inf on them, I spent merits. 1 merit = 3 converters. Merits are in unlimited supply, you just have to play the game to get them. So my 150m inf build only cost me about an hour of time in the AH/crafting bench and about 50m inf and about 50 merits. If I had gone with the OPs suggestion, I would have had to spend over 1000 merits. (roughly)

Quote

It is for people who want to play the game without being dragged down by the unavailability of the things necessary to play it with enjoyment.

This is objectively false. All salvage is unlimited. With converters, there is no limitation on what you can craft. You can get ITOs in unlimited quanty, just buy Hero Packs at 10m each, convert what you get in the pack.

Purple recipes and enhancers can be purchased at will.

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You get those points, you spend them on SO, you never think twice about money.

This is terrible advice. If you buy an SO with merits, you will out-level that SO in a few hours, meaning you will either need more merits or you will have to spend inf to buy a new one and combine. You will have to do this every 5 levels. If you avoid SO's and craft a set of IOs at level 22, THEN you can forget about enhancements until you are ready for an expensive build. Which will be easy to buy, because every merit is worth about 150k.

Quote

You want to waste your life learning this great science? Read a book instead.

This is just sad.

Spend 20 minutes reading the guide in the guide section, 30 minutes figuring out the workflow, you have invested 1 hour of time into saving yourself literally dozens of hours of grinding merits and inf.

Quote

but I don't think I have done anything special

The only objectively true statement in this post.

March 31

5 minutes ago, flyingpcp said:

OP's advice is so opposite to what's actually a good idea that I'm not sure it's not bait. The last few sentences in particular sound like they might be taking the piss

Just realized it's the same person complaining in Tech Support that GMs aren't fixing technical issues. Either very very poorly informed or like you said...

March 31

GMs are there for player support, not tech support. The petition tool is not a tech support ticket.

Savy?

March 31

Don't buy anything until 22. Skip SOs entirely.

Don't spend merits on enhancers. Buy converters and sell them. Get the explore badges in AP, KR, and SC. That's 15 merits = 4 million inf. Without clicking an attack

March 31

4 minutes ago, Snarky said:

if you want me to carry someone ignorant across the desert on my back you are looking at the wrong vampire...

If you expect rando players to meet your elite expectations on high level content in a pickup group, you are in for disappoint. Cry moar.

March 30

32 minutes ago, Sirius.Games said:

This is the reason I don't do hard mode stuff. There's too many people who expect how to do everything without saying anything constructive.

Same.

Quote

"Do not join a Master 50 TF when you have no idea what to do"

And why are we gatekeeping, ladder pulling, whatevs?? If you don't want people new to the TF on the TF, say so in LFG.

October 20, 2019

I'm not cherry picking anything. I'm talking about the ability of a single power to constantly provide a health debuff with zero interaction from the player other than optimal slotting. Auras are fine as is.

October 19, 2019

Inefficient slotting doesn't make you worse than you are with no slots. Slotting for peak sets will let you take a toon to insane capabilities but rarely will not having "the ultimate" build cripple your ability to enjoy the game unless you can only enjoy the game by having the ultimate build.

Every slot you put an enhancer in makes your character more effective. IO sets take it a step further. That's it. You can absolutely play the vast majority of the game with nothing but Single Origin enhancements, the game was played with SOs (and Hamidon Origin for the truly l33t) for about a third of it's life.

I don't know if that's the kind of answer you were looking for, but this game is very casual and new player friendly. The difficulty can be adjusted easily and tuned to your personal liking. If you play long enough and want to start setting foot into the "solo an AV/GM/+4/8 " arena then you'll need to start min/maxing.

But if you are checking out toons to see if you like them for the long haul, get IO's at around 27-33. That gets you better than SO bonuses and will give you an idea of how the sets and AT will play. Sets only make life easier.

It'd be easier to give you an idea of what combos you are considering. It's easy to say a TW/Bio with a weak build will still crush most content, but on an elec/storm controller it's different. There are different things you want to achieve. Sets are just a goal, really. As in, "just how badass can I really be?" kind of a goal.

October 19, 2019

Death shroud attacks every 2s for 12.51 damage and .52 end/s. So if we take accuracy and mob numbers out, you get 6.225 damage per second at .52 end cost. Over a minute that's 373.5 damage for 31.2 endurance.

By comparison, Golden Drangonfly can attack 4.2 times in a minute for a total of 703 damage for 47.44 endurance.

Adding .5 mobs to Death Shroud gives it 560 damage for 31.2 endurance. Even if you ran on 0/1 you are looking at 3-4 mobs per spawn, which skyrockets the dmg/end efficiency of damage auras. An 8 mob spawn gives a damage aura 2888 damage for 31.2 endurance over a minute. This is not including build up or crits.

Damage auras don't need to be touched.

October 19, 2019

1 hour ago, biostem said:

My point is that a bunch of people gathering in a location out of necessity doesn't turn that location into an actual "community hub" - People go in, do what they were forced to come there for, and leave. Maybe, maybe a tiny fraction actually socialize there, but that's the exception, not the norm; Most players want to run quests, defeat enemies, level up, etc...

Right? It's not like the AH on live was the buzzing town center/marketplace/forum some would have us believe. It was run in, do your transactions, leave. The community is on chat. What zone you are in is meaningless to the social gathering aspect of the game.

OP the only way I would give up /ah is in a trade. You give me a 30' PBAOE that immediately detoggles and suppresses all player non-travel toggles until zone and I'll take your "click on the glowie" entrance to the AH. I might settle for a toggle suppression around all points of interest.

October 16, 2019

On 10/14/2019 at 6:54 PM, TheSpiritFox said:

. This game has replay value in part because of how well I can fund alts with a solidly built purpled out farmer.

This is the real McCoy.

If I had to grind any toon like my first 50 (fire fire blaster started in Issue 0, had 1250+ hours on it) I wouldn't play... Farming as it stands right now is a pretty good sweet spot without /makeme50. Which I don't really want but wouldn't complain about.

October 11, 2019

There's some blaster builds floating around that are pretty amazing. More than one forum member has solo'd the ITF with a blaster. I've seen some builds with capped resists and softcapped defenses that still had enough AOE and ST DPS to make Brutes cry. I know one of them was /nin, and one of them was ice/.

October 11, 2019

13 hours ago, MetaVileTerror said:

could we see about making it more effective in-game

All enddrain needs to be made relevant is the -recovery element. It needs a duration that allows for two -end powers to stack before the -recovery wears off.

It works very well in the dom/controller primary. It could easily be ported to a support set across power with multiple small dual affects like the +regen and +recovery.

October 11, 2019

Stan Lee is not trademarked. There is a company that owns the mark for Stan Lee Presents and Excelsior. POW Entertainment. https://trademarks.justia.com/880/85/excelsior-88085000.html https://trademarks.justia.com/880/03/stan-lee-88003957.html

Stan the Man is trademarked, serial number 86964501

This trademark is owned by Stand the Man, Inc and is for Barbeque Sauce.

Honestly, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to stay Stan the Man, with the exception of the impersonation rule.

October 10, 2019

Just now, golstat2003 said:

Balance should NOT be around peak performance time, or "one true IO builds". Plenty of folks DON'T softacap their Brutes, Blasters, Controllers ETC.

I didn't say it should. I didn't even say anything like that.

October 10, 2019

Just now, golstat2003 said:

Or are we going to look at IOs for balance but then ignore Incarnate abilities?

I would say ignore it. There is dedicated iContent. Even though most people don't play it all that much, there is still content for that bracket.

October 10, 2019

7 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

Best at... what? Your whole scheme of balancing against IO's is based on the flawed assumption that there is only One True Build for each AT

There is. The build with capped resists, softcapped defenses, and peak damage output be it from raw damage or recharge for slots available.

That's the peak performer for xp/time.

October 10, 2019

On 10/9/2019 at 7:24 AM, Infinitum said:

I think the point is you can't reliable balance around IO slotting because you can't predict every combo that could be chosen.

Some say IOs are the problem, I say they are the reward for seeing a character through to 50 then realizing any one of a multitude of options to make them epic.

Not everyone is going to do that with every character - well I probably would because I'm OCD.

Tanks needed a buff, but I have never had the issue of tripping over brutes to find one. Well maybe the AE lobby.

Sure you can. There are limited nimbers of sets. Of those sets, only one combination is the best, everything else will fall off until you reach the performance levels of common IOs. If we draw an arbitrary line between common IOs and max performance and use that as a baseline for balance, then sets that don't reach that base line will underperfoem and sets that exceed the baseline will overachiever.

Data mining will give you information on the most common set bonuses and tell you that only x% of the AT has slotted over the base and that x% has slotted under the base.

Then you can contrast that data against the same data for other ATs and come to a reasonable conclusion about how well balanced the ATs are in relation to one another. Which is all you need because the Player vs AI balance left the building a decade hence.

You could however use that data to tweak future content. Ala Market Crash type content, but with buffed mobs. Imagine a mob group that is (sky raiders+100% damage +25% defense) on normal.

October 9, 2019

10 minutes ago, skoryy said:

Honest question, if y'all are tired of caves and task forces, then what exactly are you doing with the new characters you're farming for?

I get my characters to about 38 and then run radios with a hefty dose of Abandon Mission, join the task forces and trials I like (Yin, any of the respect trials, Market, TTtV, etc) and patrols or some of my own AE missions that some may consider farms but don't fall under the usual umbrella of "farms".

October 8, 2019

10 hours ago, MrCaptainMan said:

Some people have said they farm because they’re bored of playing the same content over and over but isn’t that what farming is?

So I played from Issue 0 for 5 years and then I left for about a year and then played again for about 6 months, kept my sub active for a year or so. I didn't actually cancel it, my debit card expired. So I've played from both perspectives, which is grinding up new toons without travel powers or inherent fitness, when mission bonus was half what it is now, and when you could easily hit the debt ceiling by sticking with a weak PUG. No IO's, no set's. Everyone was scrambling to fund their alt's with SO's and it was an actual problem to level too fast through the 20's. You could easily run out of missions, which left street grinding. Then they changed the debt structure so that running missions was more efficient than patrolling, so you could no longer find patrol teams. So when you ran out of missions you could either solo street spawns (while struggling to fund your DO's). Farming did eventually sprout up and the dev's nerfed the game realllly hard.

So pretty much everything that can be done I've either done or done something similiar enough to say "yeah, done that but at level 20 instead of level 50 +2 level shifted with 10 to 20 times more offensive and defensive power". It's all the same now. Speed ITF is a shorter version of FrostFire but easier. But only just recently did I roll an actual farmer with the intent to power farm to max efficiency. I'm not quite there yet, but it's getting close. I can now PL my main account toons whenever I feel like it, or don't. And I was surprised at how NOT GRINDY feeling it is. I can jump in fast clear or long runs and I can focus on one thing....clearing spawns in the shortest possible time. I don't know if you ever played Gran Turismo, but I get the same feeling of satisfaction from tuning the build and running it as I did tuning and running 1,000hp burners and running Laguna Seca. I'm a much bigger fan of doing that right now than I am TF's.

Plus I don't have to set foot in another damned cave.

October 8, 2019

10 minutes ago, gameboy1234 said:

I have to remember to clear my target (ESC) every time we finish a group.

I do that in the middle of a fight on squishy toons when I'm trying to avoid or shed aggro. The new slash commands for location AOE's are a godsend. I have a try full of macro's for them on my elec/shield/spring scrapper.

October 6, 2019

A spew of vhazilok.

October 6, 2019

1 hour ago, Rynjin said:

I guess CoH assumes you WASD move, Numpad for abilities, and always TAB target?

Targetting is important to me, and Tab isn't really a great solution by itself. I recommend that you bind a key to Target Nearest Enemy. I use might 3rd mouse button. It's natively bound to Ctrl-Tab but that's too clunky for me, I hit the windows key way to much.

Something that gets missed a lot:

Assist. Select a teammate and you will see their target, and you will attack their target if you are in range. If you watch, for instance, how a blaster scans a room and a tanker scans a room you'll see that they are often looking at different things. Blasters will probably be targeting the biggest threat to them, the tank will be targeting the biggest threat to the team (not always the same thing) and the supports will in assist or setting up target locations for their buffs and debuffs. You can figure out a lot and sort of glide your way through the spawns by help teammates with their targets.

Don't be afraid to mention that you are a new player and you'll get lots of help (maybe even more than you want).

You'll find that most of the players in the game have a lot of experience in the game, even on new characters. Anything you're doing has been done hundreds or thousands of times and /help is mostly there for you. There are a few trolls from time to time but mostly /help is good to go.

You're in for a hell of a ride, I kind of envy being in a place to play this for the first time in this environment. You can play through content as quickly as you want or lock your xp gains and do everything available on one toon. There's no long term penalties for defeat and almost every player you'll team with is competent. It's a much better sandbox than it ever was on Live.

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