Erydanus

Yeah I think it's good for different ATs to take advantage of different powers in different ways. The main thing with stalker ninjitsu is just, as I've said before, it was designed for the stalker at launch not as it is now. Having an extra placate was a godsend but now, it's literally just dead weight because there were systematic changes to the AT, including: a bonus critical chance just from teaming, Assassin's Focus where we build up automatic crits on AS; the ATO which puts us back in hide. Ninjitsu was literally crafted to support a playstyle of disengaging and coming back in hide. We just don't need to drop caltrops or smoke bomb and run away and come back, we just power through.

Sounds like a good way to represent GUNKATA (see: Equilibrium starring Christian Bale) which is why the DP animations are so flowy and showy - it was part of the inspiration.

Hm that's fair. I take the opposite approach usually, at least when I'm unfamiliar with a powerset. I feel like I have to get into the weeds and really get the feel of every power in order to understand the performance deeply. I have a dark/dark blaster as well and playing him's a piece a cake since I'm familiar with all the various dark powersets, it was just a matter of mapping that to the blaster high damage / made of glass playstyle and he's doing just fine. So far this combo is leaving me thinking that I may just scrap it and play the powers separately because the most important thing is: I'm not enjoying it.

I'd go with Air Superiority. If you jump up and tag a foe with it they'll fall to the ground. It just works, it has an appealing animation and the #s on it are just solid for a filler attack.

I once had a psychic blast/traps corruptor. His theme was that he'd escaped from Arachnos' training program for widows & spiders and taken some gadgets with him. Directly synergistic? Not exactly. Able to use the traps effectively and enjoy not being able to be mezzed? Yup. I played on a mostly all defender team so everyone enjoyed the generator and the acid mortar and so on. Dark miasma is also a very solid set to pair with it. I don't think there's anything that doesn't work with Dark but in particular the controllery nature of the set gives you the ability to leverage your blasts maybe a little more effectively. Fearsome Stare is so much control and then yo can stack Tar Patch and really unload with goodies like Psionic Tornado and Psychic Wail.

I've got a lowbie with this combination but it's not thrilling me. The feel of it is not very comfortable and I don't like the sound temporal makes. Are there any key points in the leveling of this combo that you feel are particularly good?

Well I honestly think traps would be just fine on small groups especially in RP groups but whatever works for you! I actually had a Psi/Traps corruptor I played with a themed supergroup and while traps is kind of an oddball set it was like carrying around a giant utility belt that everyone benefitted from. Since the team was almost all controllers and defenders the force field generator was everyone's favorite.

I think kinetics is a really interesting set. The double-edged sword of siphon speed helping you run out of endurance fast is well known; considering we now get stamina for free at a low level instead of at level 20 (at earliest) makes me feel it shouldn't be that big of a problem. It's like, say your household budget is tight and you get a raise but then you start spending more and you're still as tight as ever … where's the problem? You're overspending. That's really the issue with the game from 1-21, isn't it? You don't have very good enhancements until then because at 22 you can slot SOs or equivalent IOs and suddenly it's like your power level triples. If you slot level 15 and 20 IOs it's a smoother experience but based on leveling speed many people don't bother. Suddenly not only do you have properly enhanced stamina you're hitting so much more reliably and your power damage has doubled which means you attack fewer times to defeat a foe which in turn means less endurance spent. Thus at level 22 your end problems are solved from both ends. Smoothing out the experience is also made a little trickier when you consider that ATs which get the set as a secondary are getting the powers at later levels and more spread out and may be using them quite differently than a defender would. If you asked me about a change to improve the flavor of the set I'd suggest swapping repel and inertial reduction's levels because I actually think it would be super helpful to grant your team super jump at a very low level. Sure we can take travel powers at level 4 but I have yet to do that - I usually need a 2nd or 3rd attack right then and then usually some good buff or set mechanic power crops up. Frankly I'm usually pretty hard pressed to take a travel power before 22 these days except in a respect at a higher level. But on the flipside I could see a mastermind loving repel at a low level because maybe they just stand around behind their pets feeling safe in it...

I think that was intentional. I think the original devs looked at the corruptor and figured they were just about perfect and since it's supposed to be a damage class they gave it something with a little bit of "evil flair." It's a smidgen of help on the very toughest foes and a tiny bit of extra speed on other things. Like I said before, inherents were used for certain balance corrections so the better functioning the AT usually the less the inherent does; they also add some flavor of course. Did you guys realize the Kheldian inherent grants them mez protection if they team with a controller or dominator? That's why the human forms have no mez protection. The devs were sure that PB & WS would only be playing with their friends so that's where the mez protection is. The ability to toggle on Dwarf form, which has mez protection as well, was added later when somehow it just didn't work that well. (Don't get me wrong I love the work the original devs did but sometimes they got it SO WRONG.)

I've currently got a wee Necro/Cold mastermind going. Why? Because I was inspired to make an ice zombie themed MM. It's too low level to tell you how it's working though, all I can do at this point is shield my zombies.

Right right, I'm definitely not saying no AT needs any adjustments. Just that I don't think major adjustments to the inherents would be the best path. I think sometimes the "meta" is as much about player knowledge as anything. I have tried to explain the stalker ATOs to a few people only to be hard rebuffed on it, because "Inventions are for level 50." When I try to explain to them that the ATOs are inherently level scaling and not something just for end game, and that they could have this amazing bonus chance to hide as low as level 10 if they run a few story arcs and buy it with merits, they've already peaced out of the conversation. It's literally bring water to a horse, and they won't drink.

Honestly I think it would be fine, maybe a little slow but workable. In my head there are certain powersets that I flag "independent" and by that I mean that you can just play those sets by themselves and they don't really need anything special to make them work. For instance, my favorite control set is Gravity, but I don't think it's an independent set: it's high damage but low soft control. It needs SOME help from the secondary or else you need to plan to team with it. Mind control is an independent set. It doesn't have the typical immobilize and hold at the start, rather it has a sleep and a hold and a direct attack and that changes low level play. But what you get instead of a tiny damage AoE immobilize is a powerful AoE sleep which means it's easy for you to soft control a group and if you're soloing you can pick them off one at a time, if you're teaming the sleep will just save your team from taking their first attack and then your team will splat them. Soloing, you can make an ally by using Confuse, and you can use Mesmerize as just a spare attack or a nice quick shut down for an annoying foe like a Sorcerer. At higher levels you get Terrify for slightly more durable yet still soft controls. I'll admit Mass Confusion isn't my most favorite power and I'd personally rather have Penny Yin's psychic singularity-like pet, but overall you're good to go. Because of not having a pet I can say that at most I'd like a secondary that has some direct damage in it, but by the same token you could just make an aggressive pick of epic pool and dip into it at 35 for another attack (what I'm saying is take fireball or bile spray at level 35 and swap later if you don't like it). So basically in my opinion Mind control is workable with any secondary as long as that secondary doesn't directly conflict with it. Storm might be a problem it just depends on how you combo the powers. Traps is kind of similar. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. The big perk for it of course is the Force Field Generator, mostly for the mez resistance. It has movement debuffs, defense debuffs, self healing (regen), a stun, and yes, some damage albeit from placement of mines and bombs. It is, in a word, independent. I do think they can potentially work together very well. You have the ability to sleep a group, walk into the group and drop a time bomb then leave and throw some caltrops in your wake, maybe tossing out an acid mortar or some seeker drones. Even at lower levels you can lay down traps and leverage confuse, sleep, and fear to force the enemies to either run into the traps or stay there flailing around. Normally I'm not a fan of Telekinesis but you know what? If the baddies manage to avoid your trip mines because they pathed in a way you didn't expect, you could pick them up and literally shove them back into them or other traps. You might not shine as much on a big team steamrollering all the things but on a small team or solo you'll get to really enjoy a thoughtful and engaging playstyle.

If I could, I actually wouldn't. I don't think they're badly in need of adjustment and several of the inherents have already been carefully massaged based on years of live play. They're being used both for flavor and to shore up design flaws in some of the ATs. Part of the variability in the impact of inherents is caused by some ATs needing less help. I also think it's important to set aside personal anecdotal experience for this kind of discussion. For instance the TC as a kinetic defender didn't find endurance reduction or a damage boost useful; but you should recognize you're the anomaly. Most well-built defenders won't have a high need for endurance discount but in the event the team is overwhelmed or perhaps in a situation where Malta or Carnies mass end drain the team, or something just goes really bad and high cost powers are being spammed, it might turn the tide; I have seen that, more than once. The damage buff when solo was a secondary component specifically added later so that defenders who weren't teamed would get some benefit. It's not huge it's literally just a little something and yes it's more useful to people who can't raise themselves to the damage cap. The controller inherent - the chance to critically hit for +1 mag AND containment - provides a nice bit of extra control as well as supplemental damage that is more useful on smaller teams or soloing. I think it's a good example of an inherent that both reinforces the core function of the AT and provides some help to the player mostly when solo/small team but is good overall. In comparison the dominator mechanic is what it is (and domination has been adjusted multiple times) because the AT was inherently quite flawed at launch. Literally they had to pile more and more power on to Domination to fix the entire AT and that's why dominators by default try for perma dom, they actually kinda suck without it. Swapping those inherents? Candidly one of the worst suggestions I've ever seen. I'm not here to tone police anyone but it really shows a lack of core understanding about how those ATs work and are balanced. Stalkers all I see is a call to nerf. Why? So what the crit chance seems high, it's not actually causing a problem. Stalkers used to have problems even getting on teams because all they had was an AS from hide and then they had to run away and hide again to get much damage. They needed buffs to make them team friendly and more get them in the ballpark of being competitive with scrappers and brutes. If you look at the Flavor of the Month thread, about 5000 people got scrappers to 50 and under 2400 people got stalkers to 50. Clearly whatever amount of crit stalkers have, they're not dominating the competition; they seem viable to people and nobody is complaining about them or scrappers as an AT. Basically of all the ATs the only ones that still seem shaky to me are the Kheldians specifically because they're team-dependent still and grant no benefit when soloed. And that was by design, I believe. Originally you had to get a character to 50 to roll a Kheldian so it was assumed you'd be in a super group and have friends to play with and the ATs were specifically envisioned as being flexible ATs so when your usual group got together if the tank was out sick with the flu you could tank that week, etc. Just as the TC did say the extreme power you get when teamed, on these ATs intended to team, does seem to make up for it. Honestly the biggest problems with the ATs when soloing were 1) the massive damage from Void Hunters and 2) high incidence of them spawning, and 3) their shaky attack chains when shape shifted. And those 3 things are all addressed now (3 only here on Homecoming). So in conclusion my sincere feeling is the devs left the inherents in a pretty good position.

One thing you could do is play the actual leveling content instead of AE farming to level your character up. You'll get considerable merits for doing story arcs (IIRC doing the entire Hollows set of arcs yields like 80+ merits...) which will help you outfit your character with sets at higher levels, and salvage drops and some random recipe drops. You noted that you're trying to make a character to hook other characters up but I honestly have not had to give any of my characters much help from a sugar daddy. It seems everybody gets at least one orange drop or good recipe I can sell to get them all the starter money they need. I have taught my main character the crafting badges to make it more cost effective to outfit everyone with basic IOs. Speaking of, IOs at level 25 are roughly equal to SOs but don't expire; set IOs are that potent in terms of total enhancement % a few levels earlier, but the default is level 25 generic IOs. So you'll be able to use them soon. It'll take about 1.8 mil influence to fully outfit your first character with them at level 22, that's assuming you have to buy all the salvage.

My friend is not playing this game. I'm merely stating that I understand why some people have a motivation for this type of playstyle aside from thinking that its the best sort of approach to a support character.

When it comes to power set selection I often like to take two powersets that synergize to me and which can even be extended as part of the same meta-power or concept. But not always. It can also be fun to have someone who has two different power sets and in essence has a two-part origin. Any COH powerset that involves using weapons or equipment can be easily explained as getting equipment somehow, but you can make a more complex and rich backstory too. For this example, what about a pyrokinetic mutant who got identified by the government or a secret organization that exploits super powered individuals or maybe even Malta in an experimental program. They got trained as an assassin and then broke free. Ergo, Fire blast/ninja stuff. And good backstory for someone possibly going to go Vigilante or Rogue.

Merit rewards were established based on typical time to complete a task. If you can do it faster than at par, then you can turn around and use your time to do something else and get other merit rewards. I don't think difficulty settings are factored in or should be. You are getting the reward for doing X goal where X is completing the TF. If you want to make it harder for yourself, that's your option; your compensation for doing missions on harder settings is that you'll collect more drops and xp and influence in the process. But that's not what the merit reward is for. The flip side to the argument would be, what if someone turns down the difficulty, or more extremely, stealths every possible mission and avoids as much combat as possible. Shouldn't they be penalized for fighting easier mobs or even not fighting trash mobs at all? What if they set the difficulty to +4 x8 and then proceed to still stealth every mission possible? Should they get more reward because the difficulty is high even though they actually didn't experience difficulty, or should they get less because they only fought a handful of mobs? Ultimately the reward is for the clear and it's not coupled to how you get the clear. And I think that's good. I think if people were stealthing missions enough to speed through them then it should affect the reward. Look at the Eden Trial. It's got very low payout and that's because that's exactly what most people do, skip thru it really fast. It's unfortunate that if you do the mission the "legit" way you don't get much for it other than XP but it's still balanced for the typical player experience and I think that's ok.

I actually thought they used to exist. I had to go look it up to make sure that it didn't. The only thing that might be a little tricky is where the beacons should land you in the zones. My first thought was the beacons should go to the faction bases where you normally zone in, with different beacons for heroes and villains existing. BUT, we can have both in the same supergroup and items aren't limited anyway. Which means if a hero used a pvp zone "villain" beacon they'd be landing behind enemy lines, sorta, unless it could be alignment locked (which might be a huge amount of hassle). So alternately if there was just 1 beacon for the zone and it dumped you somewhere in the middle of the zone it could still be a spot people had under surveillance and ganked people using them. So, I think this might end up being really complicated to do. But what about secondary beacons for the zones that have the PVP entrances/helicopters, and the beacons land you top of them?

When I've run leagues for this event I've made a point of trying to keep the teams all balanced, both in terms of number of players but I also try to even out the damage and support mix. If there's 1 person on team 6, that person is screwed.

Tahquitz mentioned regional issues. I wanted to expand on that. For a moment, think of the Internet as being like the Interstate highway system. Bits of connection going from place to place, and there's multiple pathways to get from point A to point B. But, there's usually one path that is clearly the most direct. Also, these bits of of path are owned and maintained by different ISPs and they have to play nice together for it to all work (see also: why people are still concerned about network neutrality). If you're testing your connection quality you're probably connecting to a fairly local server and it's just showing you that you have no interference from your house to the internet in general. You can have a perfectly good local internet connection but if the "roads are bad" somewhere further out and your data packets are going through that area you're going to have issues. Some of you might remember we had a very serious episode on the original live servers where all the west coast servers became unplayable with about 90% packet loss for a segment of the playerbase, but only a segment. It was the people in the middle of the US and to the east. The actual problem was an ISP directly next to the server farm. Anyone coming in to the servers from the east was going through them and losing almost all their data. Anyone in the local area of the server farm or coming from the northern or southern part of the west coast was absolutely fine. I suspect the server farm team walked next door and Had A Chat with them to get it cleared up because it was a huge mess for a while and then it got fixed. So, even though your connection gives you a good speed test result, if there's "bad roads" you're going to have problems. The internet is pretty robust these days and I would be shocked if regional problems aren't cleared up within a few days or routed around. But it's always worth keeping in mind that these things do happen. I believe the game is hosted on OVH servers at their location near Montreal. If things keep being a problem then I'd Google How to Traceroute on (your operating system) and perform a traceroute on the homecoming servers. If most of the hops are 4 milliseconds and suddenly one of them is like, 10 seconds, that's definitely the problem.

I actually went with Weapon Mastery. I enjoy spamming shuriken on a 1.7sec cooldown and exploding shuriken on about a 16 second cooldown. It's really a pity that the set doesn't have the dominator Martial Assault snipe Masterful Throw.

The statement "Earth's animations are a little too intrusive for me" is very perplexing to me and I'd enjoy hearing exactly what the problem with them is and also to know if you went into the power customization section at chargen and did anything to change the appearance and colors.

My favorite controllers are Grav/Rad and Dark/Dark. And I almost rolled a Grav/Dark yesterday after singing it's praises in another post, but I made my saving roll vs. altitis. I agree they are 2 of the best options for soloing and of course also good if you team. Here are some thoughts: Dark does less damage but has more soft control more quickly. Fearsome stare will pretty much completely shut down a large group allowing you to whittle down the members. The confuse is very powerful soloing too. However the problem is that after you've controlled your foes you're going to be chipping away at them for a long time. The 2 temporary pets are really helpful but if you're soloing it will get painful. Remember that there are scaling effects as you level. You can easily solo the early levels with the damage in your controller primaries - I soloed that annoying Skull EB around level 10 on a Dark/Dark Controller mostly because Darkest Night neutered his damage output - but the more levels you get the weaker your damage feels. Arcane Bolt from Sorcery was extremely helpful, and if I hadn't started teaming I would probably have resorted to Air Superiority as yet another attack just to get to 32 and the pet. From 18-32 was really painful and teaming helped a lot. If you do go pure solo expect to take several attacks and basically just fear everything, hold the most dangerous guy, and have to wade in and punch. Dark control probably works best with a secondary that either provides damage or ups your damage, or has really good self-buffs and heals, though that's not as essential when you get your pet at 32. I think some of the secondaries that would work best with it for soloing are Dark Affinity, Storm, and Traps; I think that Nature Affinity and Time would also be ok but are more team friendly and Nature is pretty defensive especially at low levels. I think Sonic would be interesting but a late bloomer, it'd be hideous once you have pets but a struggle to get there. Imagine hanging Disruption Field on your Haunts (which won't be perma when you get them unfortunately). Gravity does much more damage but lacks soft controls that make soloing trickier and more about small groups. Not only does it have 2 direct attacks - lift and propel - they have a special mechanism that grants a 2nd bonus damage effect on top of containment called impact. The mechanism is simple, things still affected by Gravity Distortion (its movement slow lingers after its hold wears off) get another damage packet. The upshot is 50% extra containment, so do 10 damage to something held, get 10+5 containment and impact damage also. Propel also now has a small AoE knockdown effect. I found when I shot a dude with an object I often saw the 2 guys next to him flop to the ground. That was helpful mitigation. Gravity is really weak for AoE soft controls, though, so you're going to have to tackle small groups and cycle Gravity Distortion around. In the teens you get Phase Shift which is pretty useless soloing. The way it works now you can go into its AoE to fight the phased mobs, but as a soloing controller that's not helpful (though it's fine for a team) as you need something that will shut down 3-4 guys while you pick on 1. So you need to choose a secondary that will give you the soft control you're lacking, or else really good debuffs to up your damage. That's why I typically pick /rad, once you've dropped the anchors on foes they're so weak they might as well be held. Similarly Dark Affinity is great because Darkest Night is a huge damage debuff and will improve your survivability and hell Howling Twilight is a kickass AoE stun/-Regen. Tar Patch ups your damage, Shadow Fall and Fade directly buff you and Soul Absorption? SO OP. So secondaries that would pair very well with Gravity include Radiation, Dark Affinity; Storm and Traps would be a notch less effective but viable in my opinion, with again Time and Nature Affinity workable but more team friendly. So in conclusion my main suggestions are: Grav/Rad, Grav/Dark, and Dark/Dark. I actually wouldn't rec Dark/Rad for soloing though it would be hell on earth if you had a team to do the damage.

I've been catching up on older threads and this one was enjoyable. I am glad more people are appreciating the mastermind personal attacks. I did get some flack about taking any of them at all back in the day; I would tell people I was messing around with procs or slotting for debuff or whatever and still got a lot of "Sure, Jan" comments. Anyway in this case there's another reason to take all 3 attacks if you can, and that is the chance of getting another stack of Pack Mentality. Mmmm, crits. As to the dissonance of the call ravens cone all I can say is, if you're in the right place to shoot the baddies, you're in the right place to cast regrowth by 5'.

Yeah Entangling Aura is like choking cloud. It looks really cool though, you get a spiral of ivy around you. I mean, it's better than some auras but definitely a build specific kind of thing. Your idea that it's a ranged set is a little off. The AoE heal is a fat cone, but the shield and absorb buffs and tier 9 damage buff are all PBAOE; this is perhaps why it got a PBAOE heal hold. I think the intent was to be up in combat but if you need to directly heal, you'll just take a couple steps back briefly to use the cone. You can also place your heal zone and move it with you, so that's a bit of fiddly action; I've been thinking of writing a macro to make Lifegiving Spores effectively PBAOE. So I've got Nature on both a mastermind and on a defender and I can tell you: this set just works. Plenty of mitigation, some great buffs, generous healing, and some key debuffs. I mean, the -regen in the set is the anchored toggle that makes a giant mushroom grow on the target's head (really hilarious on giant monsters since it scales up). As far as your attack secondary I think you should just take whatever seems fun. Work the concept. Overgrowth gives you an insane damage buff so if you ever wanted to just shoot dudes with a nonsynergistic blast type and then spam buffs/heals as needed, this is the set for it. That's actually what I did, I wanted to do Dual Pistols just because they're fun to use but not really what I'd consider a great choice for a defender but I'm running Nature Affinity so who cares?