Erydanus

I like the cybertech trench coat, it has a metallic texture option as a second choice on top of leather. You can also ditch the tail and turn it into sort of a short of minimal wide open jacket. On guys it's almost like a bolero jacket it's so minimal.

I'm curious what your frame of comparison is. I ran an electric melee/electric shield brute when the set was released (before the secondary got a self heal and aid self was crucial). I never felt there was a problem with the melee damage as long as I kept my fury up. Are you sure you're not experiencing the feeling of low damage that's inherent to you playing a Tanker? After all, your archetype is scaled to be lower damage at the benefit of having your defenses ramped up.

Even with that, the underlying engine can be kind of dumb about how it draws things in. They worked on it a little bit but one time when I was flying over the docks in Peregrine Island I saw the detail draw in from furthest to closest distance. Literally: - the water - the pylons - the supports - the dock and street surface and finally when I was closest - the ferry. There was a period when I was in missions and I would be running at a group of foes and suddenly a trash can would draw in right in front of me. WHAM! Fortunately the worst of it got fixed but I do still sometimes see things pop in much closer than they should have been. But that's just typical for some of this game's wonky coding, right? At least it's more like small glitch level and not actually affecting play (anymore).

Well, no. The thing is Praetoria was created a new 3rd place to start playing, basically acting as a 3rd faction. The initial story arcs only go from 1-20 and then you're supposed to go t Primal Earth and convert to a hero or villian. I don't know if they're accessible through Oroborus, but I would think not. Praetoria was intended as something really new and different for players who had gotten tired of doing the same starting content over and over and I actually don't recommend them for totally new players right off the bat. However after a bit, they put in some new content in Praetoria for 20-40 where you would be going back or visiting for the first time, and that's what I'm talking about.

I've had both and really we're talking oranges and grapefruits here. Storm is about aggressive protection of your team with all the crazy phenomena, while cold is more of a traditional buff them with shields then go debuff the foes type play. You should have one of each!

Altitis has kept me from getting as far with mine as I had expected at this point but I do like it. It's fine for soloing though I think I'm going to try out the Sorcery pool's attack at least for leveling. Recently I've teamed up with an old buddy who is running a stalker and you know what? I used to think a controller with a scrapper friend was nice but HOO BOY a stalker is even better. Especially since I have some stealth in shadow fall we can both zip around the map and do precision strikes. He actually put out the call for some help last night, he was doing a sky raiders mish with a lot of ambushes and the waves were just too much. With the addition of my help we turned huge groups into cowering piles! He'd take out like 8 guys while I worked on the Engineer, who I at least kept confused to disable the others from getting his force field generator's benefit. It's a very flexible spec! Honestly though I am really struggling planning the next steps in my build and it's mostly because I want everything and that includes whipped cream and a cherry on top too. I really want to cram Sorcery into my build both for thematic reasons and because I like several of the powers, and I also want a lot of the Psionic Mastery epic pool and I just plain run out of power choices even with inherent fitness. I had regular fly already and was thinking I would get hover, but that's off the table now, the build is too tight. I've decided I want a more direct attack in my build and I want it now; my character has reached SO levels, and the base accuracy of Sands of Mu and Blackstaff are not cutting it -- like against Sky Raiders when they do manage to pull down a forcefield generator. I recently got the Haunt power and it is nice but the cooldown is too long. I need something to just shoot baddies with; in the past that would have been air superiority but instead I'm going to grab Arcane Bolt since my character is a mage. This also means I can slap Rune of Protection into my build as a personal panic button though it's displacing Fade temporarily to do that. I'm going to grab a knockback protection IO and see if I can skip Rune of Protection and just tough it out to 35 when I can take Indomitable Will. If I can't get by without it, I'm not going to be able to take Heart of Darkness until 47. (Indomitable Will at 35, Dark Servant at 38, Mind Over Body at 41, Psionic Tornado of DOOM at 44). I'm also interested in taking Enflame at 49, I'm hoping I can change the SFX to mimic the ones used for Possess because sheeting my foes in black nether fire and letting them run around burning people is absolutely hilarious sounding to me and totally on-brand for this character. So my thought was respec and swap regular for mystic flight and get Arcane Bolt instead of Haunt for now and see how it goes!

Hey Zen the only thing I'm going to say is that not slotting crush is a huge mistake. Crush is your very first power and it's a cornerstone of your toolkit. Though it does have higher than base accuracy, a good recharge and long immobilize duration, it still needs at least some enhancements. You took propel; you're going to shoot things. Excellent! But in order to get your full controller damage you have to establish stun, hold or immobilize first and crush is an excellent way to do it. It's a damaging power so if you just say, 4 slot it and use a ranged damage set that would be ok. It's a cost-efficient tool to keep the target of your anchors from running around (you don't want to be spamming your AoE immob for that if you can avoid it).

So basically Thugs/Axe Body Spray.

The problem I had recently was finishing up First Ward and just starting Night Ward and having a tip mission appear that was set after the events of i23. I sort of knew vaguely what was going on in Praetoria, but that mission actually kind of spoilered me on some of the hard details, I mean it was something like 'Visit Dying Praetoria' and featured the Seed of Hamidon stomping around in the distance like Cloverfield. Having meta-story looped back with a mission available so low was not a great idea, I don't think, at least put it at 40 to be set after Night Ward. Similarly, I was looking up task forces and apparently there's one that's new to me hosted by Admiral Sutter for 20-40 which alludes to ongoing problems with Praetoria and hints at Incarnate stuff. That's on my to-do list for after Night Ward. (Doesn't seem to have a villain counterpart.)

It's true it's unnecessary to facility paly together, but I think that for the people who used this feature, often couples, there was a certain thrill of being completely in-sync. You'd always ding at the same moment while playing together, for instance. I definitely knew many people who used it, I even used it with a couple friends who I arranged to just play a certain character with. For instance I had a friend who I played with who made a fire/kin at the same time as me, and we designed them as genie sisters. One time one of our friends on the server got stuck with a tough mission - an AV I think - and I logged on and helped with it, just that mission specifically. The leveling pact made sure that I remained right in step with my friend. (I think the no xp feature was created around this time or right after leveling pacts. That would also be an option in this situation now but I think when they went in, it was not.)

Please tell me they made fake badges for years 9–14. I think they did. I thought the old badge vendor was in Pocket D, and only enabled for the month of May?

Maybe you just need a new hard drive for your old rig? If you get a solid state drive, they are fast and quiet.

If you're going to take Power Mastery, skipping Power Build Up is a crying shame. POWER BUILD UP BOOSTS HEALS AND BUFFS. It's not just an 1 time attack build up. Its a 12 second buff during which you'll have enhanced heals, mezzes, tohit buffs, and so on. And thanks to the epic pool changes you can take it at 35! I can't get the data chunk to import so it's hard for me to add anything further to the specific analysis but I do want to point out that Vigilance provides an endurance buff as soon as someone on the team with you stubs their toe. Conserve Power is nice to have to counter Malta Sappers and things like that, but if you have a nice solid build with end redux throughout you will probably be ok without it if you're that pinched for power choices.

I actually did the 11 missions yesterday on my STALKER and it did not go that fast. I think it ended up being a loss for me compared to doing a task force with random folks (20 merits in about 2 hours of time -- I had to stop and get merits doing radio missions at a few points). I think story arc would have been a better payout. Still, my focus was on getting some badges and that I achieved.

It is super handy because you can search on one or a couple words and all exact matches will come up: like "stairs" or "metal stairs". I was working on hand lighting my base and I just typed "shoji" in and that was so helpful; I was using the various shoji lanterns and it essentially created a palette of all them for me to use. Say you're doing teleports, just type "beacon" to filter all the beacons out from that category. Now, if we could just direct clone an object that would be the greatest. Also, now that I think about it, I really need to start playing the Sims Buy & Build music while base editing.

That's governed by what I posted earlier in the thread - you need to click on the square that's filled, go into Object mode and then you can remove the segments you don't want. If the rest of the room is just fine and you've got a couple of solid squares, you can also click on a good square, go into Object mode, and click something like "apply height to room" and it will reset all squares of the room to match that good one. The builder is REALLY touchy about this, I don't remember it doing this so easily back circa I20 so it may be an issue with the current build. But, this is happening to everyone.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I appreciate them. Sounds like imgur is still playing nice.

Hopefully a GM can move your character for you, but if the game is crashing on you then you still have a problem. It's probably graphics based, based on this sort of thing happening in the past. There was a time where anyone with a cap who got near the water in St. Martial it crashed the game for anyone who had the character within their render range. It was a big problem. I would roll a new character with a very simple look and just run them to the tram and visit Brickstown and see if they crash as well. If they don't, then you know that the crash is probably caused by some combination of what your character's costume was and the zone geometry wherever they entered the zone whether it was the tram or the door. If this does happen to a 2nd character with a plain tights outfit, then you have a much bigger problem and you definitely need to follow up with GMs for technical support / bug finding.

I think some of the times it says loading character screen you're actually in a queue. Like, not a login queue but a character select queue.

Don't forget you can directly buy recipes as well (and use a slider to lower the level if you want them at a certain level). It may be more cost efficient to just buy the item. Also someone told me that the Summer event that you can run through LFG can award an enhancement in one of the sets that has one of these KB/KD procs so there's a chance to get it that way.

I disagree that capes or auras need to be gated. They were gated in the past to artificially create content and give players the feeling of scarcity and achievement. It's kind of the same with the costume slots. It's just an arbitrary hurdle that you know people can and will jump over. The only things I think could maybe be gated would be costume parts achieved from play and even then I'm only in favor of certain things. When they put in the Family style gun but tied it to the defeat family badge - that's fine if your character is a generic army dude and you just want him to pick up a family Tommy gun as a trophy. But what if you want your character to be an ex-family member from the very start? Then that gating is a pain in the ass. I don't agree with that kind of restriction for costume pieces. Something like Task Force Commander shoulder pads? That you can make someone earn, I think. Doing Katie Hannon task force to unlock witch hats? No I'd rather let someone be a hat-wearing witch from level 1 if that's their desired look. I LOVE being able to arrive out of the tutorial and immediately create a secret identity costume, as well as a slight variant of the main costume where I take of my helmet/shoulderpads/etc just basically tweak it to be an out of combat relaxed look. I like being able to start with wings or a cape if that's my concept. Honestly I usually don't. I generally think of auras as too much visual clutter but if people like them then I say let them have what makes them have fun from day 1. If you really want to get a sense of accomplishment, get some badges and accolades and set your title. That will really show everyone how hard you worked. Limiting people's clothing and accessory options is not good.

When the server started up I thought I'd do one thing but I totally did another. I thought I would mostly recreate old characters but actually I'm mostly playing with new ones. At least one of my core old favorite characters was revised with the new sets. I had a dark/dark defender who in my mind was always supposed to be a dark/dark controller. That worked well, but one of my other signature characters I who I also wanted to tweak to /time just didn't feel right. Seems like a good character so I'm keeping him as a "clone" and will eventually reroll the character as his original self. I'm actually kind of saving that character for now while I get acquainted with the new powersets. I actually struggled to remember some of my old characters' names including some favorites, but as I have played some of that came back to me. I recovered my Titan account and logged into City Info Tracker and the data was completely borked, only 10 characters saved, not final data when several of them were 50 it had them at 30; and 3 of them had other characters' bios. Ironically, that helpful because it was enough to remember them by so that was 13 characters I then remembered. I'm currently playing a character who has an old character's name but a completely new concept and he's a blast.

Shoot! I must not have the latest version, even though it's got stuff like Utility Belt in it. >_>

I opened up Pine/Mids to look at that and I don't see fire and fire listed for a stalker. Is it in the game?? You could do energy melee / energy aura and color it red for "pyrokinesis" or something like that?

I'm thinking of writing a guide up and it will require more than a dozen illustrative screenshots which is more than the board will host innately. I haven't had to do this in years, the last time I did I was using imgur for these kinds of situations. Is that a reasonable host these days still, or are there any other services that work better?