DR_Mechano

In that we're going to have to agree to disagree then. Petless MMs are just worst Defenders/Corruptors. If you wanted a petless play style, play one of them. I get that some people are like 'but muh whip attacks!' for character concept but I'm sorry that if I have the option of taking a Petless MM or literally any other class...I will take the other class. As a team leader that is MY choice. If the MM doesn't announce their a petless MM and we're actually doing something like the Ms Liberty/Recluse TF Master of Badges, I will probably say to them that they need to tell me, up front, this is what they've planned next time and depending on how they react to that, either kick them or keep them around but keep a VERY close eye on them since they are basically playing half an AT.

Martial Arts/Storm Guardian plz! If it's good enough for Tsoo, then it's good enough for me.

I get this but especially in the case of a Petless MM, considering pets are LITERALLY THE REASON YOU PICK A MASTERMIND over a Corruptor or Defender then yeah (Masterminds have the same access to power sets as those two when it comes to picking buffs/debuffs apart from I think Traps might still be unique), it is playing it wrong. The entire AT is built around the use of summoning and controlling pets, it's right there in the AT description, to ignore that is to ignore the entire point of the AT. As even you, yourself, mentioned, why not play one of those other ATs that would generally be a tad more useful with the team than the simple debuffs/buffs and incredibly anemic personal attacks. A Blapper? Still doing what its AT is designed for, damage. Is the AT doing the job it was designed to do? Can the Tanker actual tank things? Yes? Great. don't care how you do it just...you know...tank things (don't be a sluggish tank that takes forever to jump in however, look I get you're Dark Armor and your toggles cost a metric ass-ton of endurance so you need to wait before each mob but maybe turning off that fear aura that you're running might help you with that...). Can the melee ATs deal damage? Yes? Cool. Can the control ATs do their thing (now I would be specific about this one but control sets are all kind of out there and do their thing in vastly different ways. Storm for example is all about KB/KD, Illusion is all about throwing pets at the problems and confuse etc.)? Cool. Can the ATs with buffs and debuffs do their thing? Yes? Cool. If not...why aren't you just playing a Blaster if you just wanted to deal ranged damage? You'd be dealing MORE of it if you did. Heck just take the key buffs/debuffs from your secondary/primary. That is my own personal view. Why pick an AT and FORCE it to be something it isn't when there are obvious other, much better, options available for what you want to do? If you wanted to make an Offender, just pick Radiation Emission, it has a grand total of FOUR key powers, you can ignore the rest. Not only that but the powers you DO pick help you deal more damage, faster and easier with the side effect that, surprise, they also help out a team when you're on one. Now if you're trying some sort of Iron Man build like Power pools only after level 2, go for it, just let me know that you're doing it beforehand, I'll take you on a team.

Heck I'd just kill for the IDF Commander costume backpack piece with all the missile launchers. Sure it may not function but there are concepts I'd like to use with it.

With so many influences out there, I'm curious what characters have people tried to emulate but just can't seem to make work in the character creator (as good as it is). My own personal current nemesis is Artraxa, Praetors voice (was going to go TW/Bio brute)...just can't seem to make it work. Here's an image of her and as you can see, that helm is the big sticking point, that wide sweep just feels like it ain't possible in CoX sadly. Was willing to forgo the four arms thing for obvious reasons as that's completely not possible but I can't make it quite wok generally.

And, of course, the classic, 2 ill/rad controllers aka the great wall of pets. Phantom Army, Phantasm, Patron Pool pet, Lore pets. That's 7 pets each if the lore pets are up for 14 pets. Combined with double AM and double the debuffs, I'm not sure much would stand in your way.

Nope...because most powers don't have animations that work with the 'walk' animation...its less overpowered and more 'this game has spaghetti code and we've bodged together numerous solutions'.

Stalkers excel at single target while the scrappers deal more AoE. That's the balancing between them and yes they DO excel at taking out hard targets. IIRC the best Pylon DPS times was by a stalker. Build up>AS>ATO Hide proc>Hardest hitting primary. I shaved off literally half of an Elite Bosses health with that combo when combined with the Gaussian 'chance for build up' proc. Stalkers very much excel at single target DPS, beating Brutes and Scrappers. It's the general day to day where you've got large mobs they start to fall off. It's a bit like an illusion/rad controller, it isn't AS useful in a setting where your steamrolling from one mob to the next BUT the thing it does well, it does REALLY well.

Not only that but you stick in the Gaussians chance of build up proc and you begin dealing ridiculous numbers with assassins strike>Hide procs>Other hardest hitting primary. I my case it goes Assassin's strike>Hide proc>Crushing uppercut. You hit for a truly ridiculous amount even with smashing being a resisted damage type. I've popped like 600-700 damage Assassin's strikes followed by another 400 damage Crushing Uppercut. I still haven't even slotted in the 'chance of build up instant recharge' ATO in a power yet but sweet jesus I feel like with that she'd be a single target monster.

For farming you want the intangible Banished Pantheon lore pet, it is the only invulnerable pet that ALSO has a damaging attack, not only that but it is a wide AoE rain of fire style attack which can help you speed up your farming 1 run out of every 3 (or 1 out of every 2 depending on how fast you're farming the Comi-con bloody rainbow map)

One thing I would like is the option to make regular male and female body shapes as tall as the huge body shape can get, since that's already in the game, the height thing wouldn't be too much of an issue.

Purple IOs, ATOs and PvP IOs are all in their own 'sets'. So a purple IO will only ever convert into a purple IO, ATOs will only ever convert into other ATOs and PvP IOs will only ever convert into other PVP IOs. However this also works the other way that you cannot convert INTO any of those types. So a rare Sirocco's dervish cannot be converted into an ATO/PvP IO and naturally, cannot convert into a Purple IO since the out of set conversions only convert to the same rarity.

Also some people need to realize the difference between advice and aggression. One yin TF we had a /Dark armor tank who was rather hesitant about doing the whole tanking thing and jumping into mobs. Several times the brutes and the scrappers would get fed up waiting on them and just dive in anyway (especially the brute on the team, say what you will about scrapperlock but furylock is a thing as well). So I messaged them after the TF was over saying that they needed to be a bit more aggressive in their tanking style. They send me this passive-aggressive diatribe about how they had to constantly stop to recover endurance (fair enough, DA is an end hungry set if you run ALL the toggles...which you don't normally, the fear aura is great and all but you can probably turn it off on a TF) but thanks for the yadda yadda yadda. Now I had just assumed they were new to playing a tank or were a little nervous about diving in. At one point, yes I did get annoyed because Clamor had respawned (we'd done the click on computers bit) and decided to go for me (a blaster), none of the melee picked her up and proceeded to faceplant. I know I'll get the "they didn't ask for your advice, so don't give it!" but when I play tanks I'm the one that's aggressive, mainly because I'm use to high level play and I'm trying to outrun the Scrappers/Brutes in order to soak the alpha strike and feel like I'm doing something useful for the team instead of just dishing out sub-par damage and taunting the leftovers. A melee who hesitates too long is going to get left behind in a steam roller team.

Well it's free to play so...you can follow the download instructs, give it a whirl, all it's going to cost you is time after all, no money down. I will say that early levels are a bit of a slog if you're a dedicated solo player but I'd recommend going to the P2W vendor and picking up at least the prestige attacks (Sands of Mu, Ghost Slaying Axe, Blackwand/Nemesis staff (with origin bonus)) to help you through the 1-22 level range.

Funny thing was that it really died out after a while. I remember there being a massive flood of inf sellers coming on and then people proceeding to laugh their asses off at them pointing out that, unlike other MMOs, making inf in CoX was massively easy especially after the IOs and the AE came in and you could power level your own farming toon with relative ease. I remember one advertising 10 million in for a stupidly high real world money price and then a slew of "I make that in 5 minutes on a farming character...why the hell would I pay for that?" Even before you had the auction house or IOs you had inf sellers and people were like "what the hell am I going to spend that on, I'm already SO'd out...it isn't THAT hard to make money at level 50.." They died very quickly, especially on the EU servers, because it was clear that A) There wasn't the market for it and B) That they had gambled on the wrong game to try and farm since it wasn't like WoW classic where your epic mount cost 1000 gold which, at the time, was a stupidly large amount for a normal player.

GW2 solved the problem by having their max level stuff aka masteries tied to each individual expansion without invalidating all the previous expansions work and the Exotic gear is STILL near top end gear with ease of acquirement for most players. Sure there is one new level above Exotic but it isn't that much of an upgrade.

Keep in mind, Activision is probably more to blame for this than Blizzard. I reeks of higher up suits pushing to "keep up those time played metrics, we can't have people ebbing and flowing from an expansion like they use to, coming in, doing all the patch content and then quitting, we've got to keep them constantly engaged." Since WoD was when it felt like Activision really took over at pushing I'd say MoP was the last real regular expansion that wasn't designed around this need to constantly engage the player all the time, to keep them grinding, all the time, for something. Sure you had the legendary cloak quest but that came out in parts as well. I feel like the Anti-flight thing isn't just from Ion, flying means people reduce travel times, which reduces time played. Unlike in say Wrath of the Lich King which was completely designed around players having flying at max level, instead they introduced the whole Pathfinder thing as a sort of "well if we've GOT to have flying in the game...since when we tried to remove it in WoD and it was one of the many issues that led to a massive subscriber loss...then we'll not let you fly until the expansion is at least halfway done..." Its is funny that, at the time, players HATED MoP, like despised it, now they look back on it and herald it as one of the best expansion along with WotLK. I don't see the same thing happening to WoD or BfA however. WoD especially was a half baked expansion, rushed out the door and then killed off when they realized they'd made a mistake and booted 70% of the Dev team over to Legion, hence why WoD had so little content AND an entire missing story arc/raid tier. From what I can tell Legion basically saved WoW. WoD had lost them a lot of subscribers with its huge content droughts and story that nobody really cared about with characters that nobody really cared about (the only time people cared about Yrel was in NSFW fan art/animations because Draenei...). People were fine with the gear treadmill resetting every expansion because, by now, it's just part of WoW. They are not fine with their CHARACTER progress resetting every expansion because, well, it's their character. With the gear reset your character still becomes progressively stronger because they get new gear, with losing things like the Artifact weapons, the Legion Legendaries, the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite armour, it all becomes a question of "Why bother? This is all going to go away next expansion anyway...so why bother engaging with it out if I'm not a top end mythic raider?" At least that is how I felt when it came to the Azerite grind. This along with all the time gating and catchup mechanics they introduce in the X.3 patch they do (which they did for WoD AND Legion, so I suspect they'll do it for BfA as well), why bother playing before the X.3 patch when I could play it all during the final patch of the expansion no waiting around, my Heart of Azerite will get powered up stupidly quickly and I'll have many months of content available as and when I want to do it, instead of staying subscribed. The problem is the game has become too bloated. 120 levels to a newcomer just looks like too much, so they're squishing them down to 60 again with 70 being the new cap. The trouble is, like when they introduced the item level squish, this doesn't stop the problem, it just resets it. It just means 3 expansions down the road we'll be back up to level 100 again. If the WoW team weren't so focused on gear and per expansion character progression but instead worked on their idea for Path of the Titans that they once head, allowing post max level progression in a variety of ways ala Guild Wars 2 style Mastery system then they wouldn't be in this problem.

To be fair BfA did cause people to start calling them on this. The loss of the actually quite beloved Legion Artifact weapons combined with the Global Cooldown Changes (or GDC for short) led to classes being...well...very sluggish in WoW terms and people STILL say the BfA class design and class feel is by far one of the worst places it's been in a long time. Not to mention that the Azerite armor was an incredibly lackluster replacement for it. There was also the whole problem of you actually got progressively WEAKER as you leveled up because you lost access to your Legion Legendaries meaning you lost more and more abilities/powers. Leveling up actually felt pointless, especially when you learned that due to level scaling, you could twink out a level 101 and proceed to SOLO normal mode dungeons. Of course the cry of "we've heard you and we're going to make sure this doesn't happen.....next expansion...." There is also the rather large delay on patch releases for one very big reason...they had to COMPLETELY rework the 'thing' for this expansion. The whole Heart of Azeroth and Azerite armor was met with such hostility from the playerbase with numerous problems that were bought up IN CLOSED BETA but they refused to fix that they had to completely overhaul how it worked. Several people pointed out that if they hadn't done the "Whole new expansion, whole new gimmick!" but built on the Legion Artifact weapons, they wouldn't have had this problem but of course Blizzard loves to toss out the baby with the bath water every expansion in order to keep their 'time played metrics' up (since apparently THAT is how they measure things now instead of subscriber numbers....after Warlords nearly killed WoW with its truly massive 5 million subscriber loss, cutting the sub numbers in half, of which it has never truly recovered from).

I will also point out that it is confirmed, by the devs, that the ingame version of Azeroth is MASSIVELY shrunk down for obvious reasons. The expanded universe stuff makes a point of mentioning that Stormwind is a huge sprawling city the size of a modern American city and that it takes, many, many DAYS of flying to actually get from Silvermoon down to Booty Bay or at least a week to go from Ironforge to Stormwind via non-deep run tram route (aka through the mountains).

I don't watch twitch streams because...well..I like having the ability to pause and walk away without missing anything. When I was doing the whole pokemon theme it was 'hinted' at that we would be compensated for our efforts. Unfortunately said compensation turned out to be the equivalent of 'paying you in exposure' and the idea what that if we did streams that our shoutouts would help us build a community base. Naturally learning this was what caused me to ditch the whole thing because 1) I wasn't a streamer, I didn't and still don't have time for that, not to mention the personality or looks to really pull people in. 2) I knew that people would probably check out your channel once and go back to watching the streamer they actually enjoyed. You either have to be VERY good at games or VERY bad at games to pull an audience. Which is why one of my original ideas if I ever got the time to stream was going to be a "Myself + Friend fail at X" stream. Since neither of us knew anything about League of Legends or DotA in general we'd stream us being awful at it.

That was exactly my argument. Classic WoW isn't difficult, it's just time consuming and designed to waste your time in as many ways as possible because that is what the EQ style of MMO DID back then. Like I said, a lot of people are looking at this via Streamer nostalgia. These same streamers are also going to be the ones who have subs randomly running up to them and dumping gear on them just so they can get a "Oh thanks xxxhordesucksxxx for the gold and gear" 5 second thanks whilst the streamer then just carries on and forgets about that person in about 5 minutes. Unless they literally insist that the subs give them nothing, no leveling help, no help in dungeons, that the streamer has to find all their dungeon team mates on their own, then they're never going to have the same experience as joe public. Maybe I'm just bitter because myself and a team of others use to be a 'Pokemon competitive breeding team' for several pokemon streamers during the X and Y days. A group of 5 of us would put in huge work actually getting a specific Pokemon with the right nature, EVs and IVs for competitive pokemon streamers since they didn't 'have the time' to do it themselves (i.e. Each one of us would focus on one specific pokemon and we had to have it ready for their next stream, which sometimes meant taking literally 4-5 hours out of our lives to get it set up several times a week in addition to working a full time job). We maybe got a shoutout at the beginning of a stream and that was it. They would then use all our hard work and be the ones getting all the twitch and patreon donations whilst we got nothing because we were doing it 'for the love of the game'. After about two weeks of this I gave up and some other poor schlub jumped at the chance to take my place in a mostly thankless task.

Apparently the next three slots were all buffs to pre-existing slots with a choice of which of the slots you buffed (so like one could choose either buff Alpha or Interface) out of the set we have now. I'm not entirely sure how that would work but hey, that was supposed to be the idea I guess. The Omega slot, in that vain, I imagine would be a massive overall buff to the character. Apparently according to post sunset interviews it was like legit ridiculous levels of power which made even the current iTrials we have ingame a cakewalk. I imagine that it would basically turn the player character into the same power level as a regular non iTrial AV. So you'd get the PtoD, huge scaling debuff resistances, large damage resistances, large damage buff etc.

I've noticed that during non-prime time hours on the US servers, it is a tad more difficult to form a DFB, whereas about 2 months ago you could form a DFB literally any time, day or night. However there is still tons to do and still so many alts for me to build I'm going to be engaged in a while. I still haven't finished off my ill/rad build with IOs, let alone even made a start on the Incarnate content. I plan to get her build finished first before making headway into that.

A lot of the WoW classic hype is driven by streamers/influencers who have rose tinted goggles for days gone by and the whole 'Classic was difficult lol' thing. People like Asmongold, Preach, Nixxiom all yell from the rooftops about how much better classic was. This is mainly because THEY were the elites back then, they were in the raiding guilds, pushing things like Naxx before BC came out. Firstly they forgot that until AQ40 (the THIRD large raid instance in) that Blizzard were terrible at designing complicated encounters, Molten Core is a snoozefest compared to the raid instances of today, 90% of the fights were basic tank and spank with a minor mechanic to watch out for (either adds or a single mechanic like the living bomb on Baron Geddon) that were overfilled with trash just to pad out the time or had some very annoying areas to do just that (the whelp rooms with the slow in BWL spring to mind). Secondly non-raiders were, by and large, told to suck it up and left in the dirt, if you didn't raid at endgame, you didn't DO anything. Admittedly they did throw these people a bone with the Dungeon set upgrade quest line which gave you tier 1.5 gear for like thirty times the amount of effort it took to actually raid. For some reason these youtubers/twitch streams seem to equate 'took bloody ages to do' with 'challenging content', which isn't the case. Not only that they'll have the advantage of a legion of subs helping them out just so they can get a 5 second shout out on their stream (Asmongold is notorious for basically being fed through the game, supplied gold, equipment etc. by his subs just so they can get a mention). People who aren't these guys will find it much harder and not a lot of fun once the rose tinted goggles wear off and find that trekking across the continent via walking and flight masters not a lot of fun. Vanilla isn't very much fun, despite what people say, it's a slogfest of old school MMO design that, in the modern age, doesn't work as well. Now Wrath of the Lich King, when Blizzard finally got their act together, knew how to balance leveling speed, well paced and interesting quests (ones that, while were essentially still 'go get 10 bear asses' were still engaging) and interesting talents is when WoW got its act together. I predict that WoW Classic will have what happened with Homecoming. A huge surge of people at the beginning followed by a sharp drop off after the first month and then a slow dwindle down to much lower numbers. I also predict that at this years Blizzcon not only will we get an announcement for the next WoW retail expansion but classic: TBC edition! (much easier to do since all the TBC content is there and remains largely unchanged beyond numbers tweaks) with offering the option to move from Vanilla servers to TBC servers if the playerbase wants.

Millions eat at McDonald's every day. That doesn't make it good. The question wasn't whether WoW is good, but whether it does anything better than CoH. The fact that the food is bad has nothing to do with how good the company is at, say, supply chain logistics. For example, WoW is vastly better at strategically interesting boss fights. CoH barely began to experiment with rudimentary versions of that towards the end of its life; almost all AVs are what WoW players would call "tank and spank". Maybe you don't WANT a cheap greasy hamburger, er, a strategic boss fight. That is perfectly fine. But whether you want it or not, they're very good at making it. I will point out that the initial Raids in Classic WoW were incredibly basic, especially compared to much, much later designed ones. 90% of Molten Core is tank and spank with a single 'watch out for this' mechanic (Baron Geddon being a prime example, tank and spank + Living bomb), Onyxia is a 'avoid deep breath, deal with adds', that's the entire mechanics of the fight. It wasn't, really, until Naxxramas that they started to add in more complicated things since most of the fights usually relied on Resistance Gear (which is going to hit new players like a truck when they go into classic. Not wearing optimal DPS gear (As a hunter I remember wearing the Black Dragonscale set 3 piece for the fire resist throughout molten core or having to run Aspect of Nature through AQ40 for the +Nature Resistance along with additional resist gear especially for the Princess Huhurun fight) just so you can get the most resistances. It took them probably until, realistically, Burning Crusade to actually get down raids that had interesting mechanics. I suspect that CoH, if it had continued development, would have begun to learn how to pull off such things in-engine but the iTrials are basically the same as MC, BWL and AQ40, the very beginnings of learning how to do interesting raid mechanics.