Erydanus

When it comes to builds I'm firmly a believer that you shouldn't get too fixed on a particular build because the way the game plays does change at different levels. Some of that has changed because of inherent fitness and the relaxation on restrictions in pool powers allowing you to get a travel power at 4. However, how you want to slot things may change quite a bit, and at 50 especially you may want to redo everything. (Level 50 IOs are stronger than SOs, so at that point powers you put 3 of something into can now get 2 level 50 IOs and in many cases be good enough like that (stamina for instance) or you may just selectively use level 50 IOs to get a 2 1/2 type setup.). For any controller leveling build I think these are the cornerstones: - your primary single target hold and immobilize, and if your set has a single target confuse, that. - at least 1 AoE miscellaneous AoE control from your primary like a group sleep, fear, or confuse. (Group phase shift is skippable, totally your option.) - your AoE hold (these tend to require massive investment in slotting due to a balance adjustment way back when but they're still an important tactical tool) - if you solo at all and your set has a direct damage power, get it. In the case of Gravity that has both lift and propel, one's good enough. - from your secondary, any obviously essential buffs/debuffs that will help you as a controller - since you're not a defender, pure support powers like a heal targeted on an ally are still useful but not as high priority. After all you'll have a pet eventually and want to heal them. But a group heal which affects you too is certainly useful; I'd get it but I would put controls a bit ahead. - any travel or support power you like - don't forget to slot inherent stamina Now, my past experience with plant control was as a dominator; my only experience with nature affinity is as a mastermind and not high level. NA looks good but it does have a lot of heals in it. So I have prepped just a very general list of the order I'd take powers in to get you going. Typical Power Selection Order Power names in italic denote the most flexible choices; basically those are good places where you can interchange powers with each other or slide in travel or other pool powers. Level 1: Strangler - I want to start with a single target hold Level 1: Corrosive Enzymes - obligatory; but a good debuff Level 2: Entangle - I want the single target immobilize next, for damage purposes and just because it's essential to have those two cornerstone powers. Level 4: Wild Growth - this is a combination shield and regen buff for the party including yourself so I do recommend taking it for some self defense. Level 6: Spore Burst - this is a nice area effect sleep. If you're getting overwhelmed especially at low levels this will reliably conk out most of a big pack of minions and then you can single target the ones awake. If you're teaming a lot it would probably be better to get Roots here so you can bind a group of foes in a handy clump for the damage types to AoE, or for use with the next power. Level 8: Seeds of Confusion - some people don't like confuses but I do. If you're teaming, the benefit of a group confuse is basically making a crowd of foes waste an attack shooting each other while your team actually wallops them all. XP loss is trivial in that situation. If you're soloing or just playing with a buddy it's more of an active tool where you make your enemies really do your work. Again I think the xp loss is a completely reasonable trade off. Basically between spore burst and this you should have at least one, if you don't like one of them just grab roots earlier. Note that this is also a good time to take a travel power instead. I personally am just going with Ninja Run right now. With Swift and Hurdle now inherent and the jump pack also available for occasionally climbing up a wall, I feel it's good enough to get by. Level 10: Spore Cloud - this is a toggle you place on foes to lower their damage output, to-hit and regeneration. It's like a radiation infection or darkest night. End cost is a bit high but with inherent stamina it should be fine even without enhancements. While ideally your controls should stop people from attacking you sometimes it just doesn't work out that way; for instance maybe you have a boss or even an Elite Boss show up in your mission. This type of power is essential then. Level 12: Regrowth - The primary power set has Spirit Tree at this level, which is a +regeneration beacon. It never impressed me. Since the secondary set has active heals, I'd say to skip the tree and take the actual heals instead. It's an unusual heal in that it's a cone starting at (and affecting) yourself. Level 14: Roots - if you haven't had a chance to pick up the AoE immobilze (or the sleep or confuse) now's your chance. By the way this power does more damage than any other area effect controller primary immobilize. I think it's a holdover from this set being originally intended for Dominators. It's still a low damage power but it's more damage than is typical in a hold set, and it might be worth slotting for some damage depending on your playstyle. Level 16: Lifegiving Spores - placeable group heal over time/recovery field. I haven't had the chance to use this or other powers in affinity yet but it looks good on paper. Probably a bit of an end hog so run as needed. Again this is a good place to swap in a travel power or juggle the sleep, confuse, and AoE immobilize with. This is exactly an example of a power that a defender is going to jump on and for a controller it's nice for the party but not essential to your job of crowd control. Level 18: Vines - your AoE hold. Generally you want to take these as soon as they're available because they typically need 1 acc, 2 hold, 3 recharge or some close variant of that with invention enhancements. Level 20: Wild Bastion - a nice AoE damage barrier and heal buff which affects you so it gets self-defense priority. From here on just take all your primary/secondary powers as they're available. There's literally nothing but pool powers for you to take at 22 and 24 unless you took extra pool powers earlier and if you did I'd finish getting everything in your primaries and secondaries except spirit tree. The inclusion of inherent fitness and lowering the minimum level for a true travel power to 4 means that you don't have to skip any primary/secondary powers to get those. If you want to take extra pool powers, say multiple leadership and travel powers, then you'll have to selectively skip an optional power or two. Going forward though I'd take every available primary and secondary as they're available. (Even if you end up soloing a lot with this character I'd still take Rebirth at 28 because it's a combo rez and single target heal and you can use the heal on your Fly Trap pet you'll be getting at 32.) About the only thing I would say you have to play with a bit is Entangling Aura at 35. I'm not sure if the endurance drain is worth it for the minion-level hold. It looks an awful lot like radiation's Choking Cloud, which on my Grav/Rad controller I kind of flip-flopped on whether I liked it or not. You can now tap Ancillary/Epic/Patron power pools at 35 not 41. Fly trap at 32 is mandatory and Overgrowth at 38 is clearly a good buff for yourself and the pet. That means if you'd like to start on power pool powers early, you could skip Entangling aura and get one of the primo choices like Psionics/Indomitable Will, Fire Mastery/Fireball, Ice Mastery/Hibernate. If you're going for Primal Forces mastery for the incredibly potent Power Boost at 44, you can at least knock out a pre-req at this point.

Let's make this a general question thread on base building questions ~ I noticed that one of the new options is skies and I placed one but it just kind of fuzzed the base atmosphere. Is there some way to emulate an outdoor space or are the skies just for lighting?

I really enjoy playing controllers, solo and in groups and I was very excited to see this brought up. I will however spare everyone from the essay on controller soloing I wrote during lunch and focus on adding some additional tips. Regarding containment, it applies to primary, secondary, power pool, and ancillary/patron powers but not temporary or prestige powers. I don't think it even works on brawl. But since it includes power pool attacks it's worth considering them for a soloing controller. I was looking at the numbers on them but I had Mids open and it's not current. In the past though Air Superiority was a good filler attack for controllers. It does about the same damage as most controllers' single target hold, has good endurance cost, casting time, recharge, and animation, and has a nice -fly effect which may come in handy. If you were running Illusion Control I would look at the fighting pool's boxing because it's got a decent chance of a weak stun, though it's lower damage. I'm actually going to test out the pool attacks and see how they're working. When picking powers as a soloer just remember any power that buffs a teammate only is dead weight until you have a pet, so probably pass on those powers until you have a pet, or respec at that time. Of course this also means a buff-heavy or heal-heavy powerset may not be your best choice though again once you have your pet then you can make them even stronger. I'd also like to point out that this game does support dual builds, though you have to slot them separately and until we're all running around with 50s to bankroll our lower level characters that may be tricky. But it's an option. Finally if you're trying to figure out which controller power set has the most native single target damage, hands down it's Gravity Control. With Lift and Propel it has 2 direct attacks that far outclass any single target attacks other controllers get. Though Fire has some nice aoe damage, it really only blows up big if you're playing a Kin, but then it really blows up.

It's not related to Atlas Park. I've been experiencing the problem myself and picking between Galaxy City, Outbreak, Breakout, and giving up and trying to login to an existing character in Cap is not making a difference. So what happened was I was on Excelsior and logged out to character select, rolled a new character and at the end of the process, instead of going into the tutorial got Lost Connection to Dbase Server. I logged in again, was told I was already logged in. Logged in anyway, ***seemingly bypassed the queue and got the character list within 2-3 minutes***. The character name got saved but not the info so I had to delete the name and do the chargen over. Most of the selections were saved anyway so it was just click through mostly. Same thing happened again 6 or 8 times, then I switched to my existing character. I kept being able to jump right to loading the character selection screen but got db served every time. Maybe the queue jumping patch isn't working quite right? I checked the other 4 servers and they all had big queues but if I came right back to Excelsior I was being given queue bypass priority for charselect (but maybe not for login??). At that point I gave up and queued on Indominable. Same thing happened again - chargen failed, I could log back in from the dbase disconnect, but I couldn't actually create a character. Edit: it's stopped loading the character list for me. I re-login and after 30-40 seconds it just dumps me back at login, it's not even letting me queue.

Honestly, and I am merely remembering raging about this from years ago, Stalker Martial Arts wasn't broke and didn't need fixing. I wanted to yell at the devs "do you understand what a stalker even is??" I had a martial arts ninjitsu stalker and he went through everything like a hot knife through butter. On the other hand I totally hated martial arts on a scrapper. Something about the way it worked on a stalker was just great for me but it felt clunky on scrappers. I don't know. At least I got mine to 50 before the silly change. I wish I could remember what that stun did for me. I know I used it ALL the time. Maybe it was just being able to stun Dude #2 and run away and reset hide quickly that was what I liked about it. That said it wasn't just a stun it was a pretty solid attack on its own too.

The thing about the game is that the power sets that are shared between archetypes have their effectiveness scaled appropriately for the class's strengths, and sometimes have powers tweaked depending on how close the archetypes are. Because of special needs an AT might have some powers might be swapped out to make room for say, a Taunt, or a self-heal or crowd control ability. But usually they're at least 80% the same just differing in power. If you look at the archetype descriptions for like Tank vs Scrapper or Defender vs Corrupter you'll see the defense vs offense ratings change. Like you can think of a tank being 60% defense and 40% offense but a scrapper is the inverse. Having katana melee attacks and storm summoning powers (which is a support buff/debuff set) would be very weird. Honestly there is an archetype where it would almost work though and that is the Dominator. Dominator primaries are control sets. Their secondaries, "Assault" sets are like a combo of blaster secondaries with a couple decent attacks wedged in. You could absolutely construct a Dominator secondary that was about stabbing people with blades and chucking knives at them for their ranged attacks (and then skin the weapons as katanas and kunais). And, just as the support set Dark Miasma got a cousin set as Dark Control, you could probably also create a Weather Control set out of Storm Summoning. But it would be a ton of work. Conceptually it's sometimes best to just pick something close from the current options and maybe hand wave it a bit. You could roll a Katana/Electric Armor scrapper or brute. You couldn't summon storm clouds but you would be electrified! Or for a Dominator you could pick Electric or Ice Control as a primary and Electric or Icy Assault as a secondary. You could definitely position that as a storm god ... just not "bothering" to use his katana.

One thing that really bugged me was when they tweaked Martial Arts for stalkers and swapped the positions of (IIRC) cobra strike and crane kick. Cobra strike is a single target stun and it was one of those "well I guess" powers for scrappers. But for stalkers having a stun at low levels was so useful but I forget why. It did something like reset hide or have a chance to trigger the assassinate power (SO foggy haven't had a chance to check). Crane kick? I, a stalker, given a small aoe melee attack at low levels? NO THANK YOU. Thanks for explaining about Galaxy City I always wondered why they zapped it to make a new tutorial. I liked having the variety of doing different origin contact arcs but with all the running around, if you were playing with friends and you didn't all go to the same zone it was a hassle. I quit before the Dark Astoria revamp -- not by choice. I started crashing reliably on certain maps including one of the important incarnate storyline ones and tech support gave up on helping me. I've got a completely different computer now though so it shouldn't be a problem. But the shut down really hit me hard because I was sort of planning to re-up as soon as I got a better computer and then the announcement hit and I was locked out. I am looking forward to checking it out at least. Another pet peeve was when they put in Wentworth's and added the kill zone but didn't re-route the giant ghost around the one in (Saint Martial?) so you could have the zone event die on the auction house. That seemed lazy...

Whoa news to me. I will check into that!!

Now that bases are free ... and I have completely forgotten the layout of my favorite SG base from back when... it looks like I'm going to have to sit down with a pad of graph paper because doing trial and error layouts under the current server load is just silly imho. In ye olden days when we really had to worry about power and control and prestige the bases grew organically. I remember I had a standard starter base template I used that would get a med bay and a couple teleporters up and a bit of crafting space with the standard starter prestige, and then grow based on how the SG did. But now? It's overwhelming. For instance do I want to use 1 jumbo teleporter and put a bunch of beacons on it, or do I want to have a row of small porters with their own beacons easy to read in front of them? Or a combo maybe? What would be great is if we had some kind of base planner app - maybe even something web based - that worked a bit like Vizio but with the various room sizes and shapes in the palette so base layouts could be planned and tinkered with. At least to get the overall shape of the base planned. Or, you know, graph paper. What do you guys like to do to plan your bases? Dig in or paper, or what?

Ah formerly @erydanus now @eridanus checking in. My most notable characters from Virtue were Kid Physics who I used to do classic Hami raids a lot with (Legion of LiveJournal) and Erydanus who was the leader of the Paladins of the Night, which was originally a dark/dark defender themed group.

Yes! I overlooked her the first time. In the Galaxy City tutorial when you finish the first little bit and level up, there's a trainer before you go into an event fight. A P2W rep is right there. What is really nice is you can claim several of these powers and the way they are doled out seems very balanced to me. Like of the sands of mu, blackwand, nem staff, and ghost killing axe you're allowed to pick 3 (and there are some extra versions of the staves for origin match or no). You want ninja run? you get ninja run. Need the jump pack? You can have 1 free. Keep in mind FULL travel powers are now available at level 4 though and you get inherent swift and hurdle at level 2. But NINJA RUN. You want the fortune telling or mutation power or that third one about inner inspiration? You get 1 free, you can buy more later when you have fat sacks of influence. You want the prestige sprints? Click here to get them all at once but we can't take them back. Want to erase the starter power or give back sands of Mu? They can do that. The vendors also have some other perks and temp powers for actual sale but some of the most primo things people want are available immediately for free. The P2W vendor in Atlas Park is on the plaza near Ms. Liberty. If you go to your map (M) and zoom in there is a store marker you can click on if you're having trouble finding her (likely, she'll be surrounded by a crowd.)