Machariel

I would like to echo the sentiment that "farming isn't the most tedious part of the game." For me, that's going through all the mouse clicks through the AH, the salvage interface etc to kit out the new character. ugh. . .

the good times had to come to an end eventually but i think the game is better for it 😄

Really really cool changes overall. I think you absolutely nailed the titan weapons changes. I can't speak for old fans of energy melee and I think some might be unhappy with a combo mechanic, but it looks fun and I'm excited to try it. Also, in general, the amount of support this game is getting from a purely volunteer team is amazing. Thanks for all the hard work.

make sure you pick up both of the stalker ATOs as soon as possible if you haven't already as they make a great archetype even greater 😮 KM/EA gang lets go!

I think most of them are fine, broadly speaking. For a lot of them the T9 is the capstone of the set and a lot of the reason you take the set (Fulcrum Shift, mostly) The T9 doesn't need to be the best power in the set but there's a few powers that stand out as being stinkers: Time Bomb (Traps) - because it's a pain the butt to use and doesn't do that much damage Empathy - A single target buff that solves a problem that doesn't come up much at high levels (endurance) and that it already does in spades with Recovery Aura and Regen Aura Force Bubble - wowee Hurricane without the debuffs and higher level, whoopee. Some T9s are better than others but I think that's fine, it's more important that the sets are balanced than that the T9 in one set is as "good" as the T9 in another set.

I'd try to fit another damage proc into Psychic Scream as it has a much higher proc chance than dart burst (longer animation + 2x the recharge). The annihilation proc doesn't stack, so I'm not sure if having it 3 different places is the best use for slots. I'm not sure what combination is best for maximum theoretical uptime on the proc is, but I'd probably just stick it into Dark Obliteration and nowhere else, since dark oblit has the highest proc chance. (Unless it's just a flat 20% chance no matter what and exempt from PPM). Gaussian Proc works fine in Tactics and it gets a chance to go off for each ally within range and probably counts pets as well (Carrion Creeper vines count, so). But, since you already have Follow Up procced out, that's an OK place for it too. If you don't need the mitigation from knocking them down then you could also swap the KD procs for whatever, with the side effect that enemies will get grouped up slightly faster for Spin + other AoEs. For a while I had both Dart Burst and Psychic Scream on my hybrid Fortunata and jumping around maximizing the cones is indeed fun, so I like where you're going on the build 👍

IMO the top 4 Stalker AoE primaries are Elec, Ice, Dual Blades, and Savage. For your secondary you can get a lot of AoE out of Radiation Armor with its 2 large PBAoE attacks (ground zero can hit up to 30 enemies) although armor sets without defense can be a lil awkward on stalkers if you get smacked out of hide or w/e. Honestly Rad Armor aoes + ball lighting or dark obliteration is a pretty sizable amount of AoE on its own independent of the primary. I usually play a DB/EA/Mu and it's not like an AoE warlord but a few sweep combos and sweeping strike feels like "enough" AoE, for whatever it's worth. I find that on Stalkers mobs don't stay grouped up around you very well as enemies get bored of missing and wander off and they have no taunt aura and low threat generation so situations where i might really want to use 7 or 8 AoE attacks in a row are pretty rare.

general snarkiness at a question that I perceived to be "are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?", which when i read i thought both unhelpful and condescending. Obviously I don't expect people to agree with this which is why I didn't bother posting, but you asked 🙂 My preferred tool for +4x8 solo Arachnos is a Plant dom because you don't have to worry about nasty things like auto-hit defense debuff, Mu sapping your endurance, or banes placating you for free crits when they're all using the powers on each other. Caveat: Fortunata Mistresses have very high confuse resists and can dish out a lot of psi damage very fast, so when things go wrong that's usually why. (they are managed with stacking holds or kiting with immobilize powers). On the other hand sometimes Toxic Tarantulas will venom grenade a whole mob for you and that's pretty slick. that said, I agree that when fighting them "honestly" the biggest issues are defense debuff (especially if the defense is coming from IOs or other sources with minimal DDR) and the fact that things like endurance drain and slow effects start getting really obnoxious in long fights. Blind too is very annoying if you are only relying on yellows (even with tactics) if the insps dry up. My overall pick would probably be Dark Armor with its massive heal, high resistances to nasty things like end drain and psi, and Cloak of Darkness' perception boost.

Martial Arts has a very slight accuracy bonus on its attacks over Kinetic Melee. (78.75 base accuracy instead of 75%). Whatever your problem is (it's hard to tell with the very minimal amount of information provided) it will very likely not be resolved by rerolling into Martial Arts. As an aside, Kinetic Melee is much stronger on stalkers than on scrappers so if you're willing to reroll because you are unhappy with your performance you may wish to keep that in mind.

Im sure you can, I usually find that I’m better off putting one there. YMMV.

What Saiko said, assuming they also use energy drain to hold a LOTG.

I'm aware. 😉

You may or may not know this but I assume many people reading this do not: EVE Online has a "Council of Stellar Management," (CSM) which is a group of 10 players, elected by democratic vote of account holders (caveat: one vote per paid account, and players with multiple accounts are extremely common in EVE), whose official role is the be the player liaison to the developers. They regularly converse with the developers and get flown out to Reykjavik, Iceland for a 5-day summit annually, the output of which are meeting minutes. It has led to a number of balance changes. That's the closet thing that I'm aware of to what you're describing and there was a LOT of compromise with the developer team, who obviously had the final say. I mean it's always going to be "dev based plans" that get implemented into a game (or into anything else that's developed)... if the devs don't plan to do it then it doesn't happen. There are in-game campaigns but the CSM had its own section on the forums and while it's possible to spam chat with messages or leave billboards out in space it's also quite easy in EVE to filter those out. I should point out also that EVE Online is about the MMO that I can think of that's furthest away from City of Heroes in spirit - sandbox vs theme park, PVP vs PVE, punishing vs accessible, etc and I would guess a much higher proportion of what we would call "highly engaged players". For various reasons already stated by other players I think probably CoH doesn't need a kind of direct democratic mechanism in place. Some interesting trivia is that the CSM was formed after the fallout of a game developer using his admin privileges to spawn rare items that gave his in-game alliance a considerable advantage, and that early on part of the expectation for the CSM was that they would be a check on the developers Internal Affairs department. 🛸

My unsolicited thoughts on Titan Weapons btw are that while the set is clearly an overperformer by the numbers, and while it is very popular, I actually think it's in a good place and I don't feel like I see much of it in the wild. Obviously that's an anecdote and not indicative of anything, but to fortify my ego I will present this completely unjustified observation as the ✨Fermi's Paradox of Titan Weapons✨ (aka "if TW is so strong and so popular why don't I see more of it it?") Anyway in my opinion it is only a real overperformer at endgame, because TW has a number of drawbacks that are overcome at level 50 and especially at level 50 with IOs (aka, endgame). The Momentum mechanic means that when you (for this post, the 'general' you) miss an attack with TW you lose more than you do on other sets. By this I mean that katana hitting 50% of the time is doing 50% as much damage as katana hitting 100% of the time, whereas Titan Weapons hitting 50% of the time is doing less than 50% of TW hitting 100% of the time, because TW is either wasting time in momentum or, even worse, failing to build it and having to use another slow attack. This gets even worse when you don't have powers on cooldown to use, because you simply don't have enough powers yet (aka at low level) or because the powers take too long to recharge (ditto). Also, getting hit with -tohit or Slow effects makes this worse. Now when you eventually get sufficient defenses to dodge most debuffs and enough +acc to power through tohit, and enough recharge to not only ignore slows but also pare your attack chain down to your best powers, then the streakbreaker will generally keep you humming along and then you start setting records. Titan Weapons also has a couple anti-quality-of-life features like its endurance use (fixed with IOs) and being forced into using slow attacks, which some people dislike on principle and makes you prone to corpse blasting. I note that corpse blasting is less of an issue in situations where enemies generally aren't dead in one hit and/or where the TW character is off on their own, both of which are common at endgame and in many standard performance metrics (pylon, solo TF) and in "feats of strength" like "the TW char ran away from the team to clear half the ITF tunnel by themselves 🙄" I could even resolve the "paradox" of with "because it appeals to the kind of players who like to solo hard content and have no problem PLing and funding a TW/Bio on a whim". Seriously... running a TW character through DFB is rough. It even gets in the way of Cadaver Counter since the only attacks you can safely use are Crushing Blow and Follow Through. 😅 Now, is it appropriate to judge sets at endgame? Yeah, I think so, because "at level 50 with a full build" is a sensible balance point. And, does a level 30 TW/Bio still outperform a level 30 [whatever] even on SOs? Maybe, I have no idea. But I thought it was an interesting perspective and if changes are made to bring town the "top end" of Titan Weapons, maybe it is worth thinking about how to improve the feel of the leveling experience. (Or not, if it just gets nerfed I'm not going to lose much sleep over it.)

My takeaway from this is that having more than one Dominator on a team can be redundant. Once a mob is controlled, making it more controlled doesn't make the fight any faster. Indeed, it might even slow it down, in that the time spent casting the control powers is basically wasted. Also if like 20 enemies are confused, applying a hold or stun etc to them makes them stop attacking each other, so that potential damage is also lost. Unlike controllers Dominators aren't really force multipliers and don't have debuffs that make things die faster, so while they can complete the TF in relative safety (and skip Minotaurs/Cyclops T9 by stacking hold magnitude), they can really only defeat things as fast as 4 Dominator secondaries. I don't think that's necessarily bad, it's just a function of how the AT is designed. On the other hand, it also makes a big difference whether those secondaries are like, Fire or Ice vs Elec or Thorny. So they could definitely handle being looked at.

For me, my dominator was my first character on Homecoming which means she had a 'budget' permadom both for the leveling experience and until I had enough rewards to get all the purple sets and PVP IOs and such. I would say that it is definitely worth the expense as the purpled build gets a lot more recharge with a lot fewer slots devoted to recharge. The most dramatic example is that I had Carrion Creepers slotted with 6pc Kinetic Crash for the 7.5% recharge on the budget build and 5 damage procs on the final build. Does the character play differently? Not really, but the final build goes through +4x8 significantly faster than the budget build went through +2 or +3x8.

5pc armageddon w/proc + fury of the glad -res ?

1: how do these attacks work? - sniper powers are single target ranged attacks that have a "slow form" and a "fast form". The slow form has a 3-4 second interruptible windup animation before the actual attack animation, and deals additional damage compared to the fast form. When you use the "slow form" in-game, you'll see a little "Sniper Shot!" callout above your target when you hit and you can see the additional damage in the combat log. 2: Can they be used in a standard attack chain in the midst of battle? - yes, absolutely. You get the "fast form" if you are considered to be "in combat", aka if you've attacked or been attacked in the last 8 seconds, using the same timer as Hide. 3: It says Insta-cast at 97% To Hit - In earlier versions of the Snipe mechanic, you indeed only got access to the quick form when you had over 97% tohit. Your base tohit is 75%, so that means you needed 22% from other sources (the kismet +6% IO and tactics are the most accessible). This is outdated since they tied quick sniping to 'combat'; however, snipe powers get a damage bonus that scales with your tohit up to 22%. This bonus applies to both the slow and fast forms. 4: They are quite expensive and on longer recharges, but as powers that you get towards the end of the career they are pretty manageable. As aethereal mentioned the long recharge means they take damage procs very well and on stalkers they're great places (and often the ONLY places) to slot ranged damage sets like Apocalypse. 5: The "fast snipe" enhancement basically removes the "slow snipe" utility and means so that whenever you use it, in combat, out of combat, etc, it will always be the fast form. Frankly I can't think of a reason to use it, since it's not like you can somehow goof and accidentally wind up using the slow animation like you can with AS. In general, snipe powers are a 'nice to have'. They do tons of damage and sometimes you really want a long distance ranged attack, and they hold useful sets (apocalypse for 10% recharge, winter sets for defense, etc) and proc out super well. Also, on Stalker sets that don't have a great "heavy hitter" power to use from Hide immediately after Assassin's Strike (Kinetic Melee / Dual Blades come to mind), AS w/Hide proc into guaranteed critical Snipe hit is a ton of burst damage. One caveat is that the power doesn't build assassin's focus.

Most of my characters follow a similar arc of getting PL'd to 50, receiving IOs, getting Task Force Commander / Portal Jockey, a few incarnates and then getting incorporated into my growing pool of characters. (I'm pretty lazy). I think my favorite level range to play is about 30-40, and while I'd guess I spend more time at 50 than anywhere else I'd say I spend a good amount of time exemplared. I like to have a good attack chain and a travel power by level 20 so sometimes I take kinda bad powers like Fire Breath to fill out AoE at low levels, even though most of the time I'll never touch the power.

The biggest turnoff to PVP seems to be the perception that PVP is so different from PVE that even a pimped out PVE character is simply playing a different game and easy prey, so they get ganked instantly, and that's no fun. Now, I don't know if that is accurate, nor do I think it's necessarily unjustified. But it is pretty unforgiving which is jarring in a game that's as accessible as City of Heroes. I used to play EVE and that had a pretty severe death penalty as far as games go... you lost your ship, about 1/2 of your ship's equipment and cargo (which could be stolen by anyone if they got to it first), plus if you also lost your escape pod you suffered additional losses and (for most of the game's life) even potentially some XP. But that looks easy next to diablo hardcore since in EVE you could replace ships in bulk... not so in this case. I'd like to see additional, objective-based game modes for PVP. A mixed PVE/PVP game mode, like Destiny 2's Gambit, might be interesting. This is a game mode in which each team is racing to complete a PVE objective, in separate instances, but one player can "invade" the other team's instance for a limited time, a few times per game. In Gambit you get I think 30 seconds or until you've eliminated the whole team. Anyway this closes the gap between PVE and PVE a great deal. The defending team always gets to defend 3v1 or 4v1, and it means that both teams need to be able to clear regular PVE content quickly if they want to win, so suddenly a lot of the things that only matter in PVE or only work in PVE (controls, anything in the format of xxxxx / time, etc) have at least some utility.

Croax didn't but I did! 🙂 I have a DB/EnA/Mu with both zapp and ball lightning. The thing I like about them is that they're attacks that you can weave into a chain without interrupting a combo, which means I can do: Build Up -> AS -> Zapp (critical) -> Ablating [sweep combo] which is nice because Dual Blades doesn't have a great "heavy hitter" power like Freezing Touch or Crushing Uppercut to really leverage the ATO hide proc. Ball Lightning from Hide is cool too. With a no redraw option I don't feel like it interrupts the DB flow. That said, I'm not 100% convinced including a snipe even is a damage boost. I think it is, but I haven't crunched the numbers at all. A high recharge Dual Blades chain is very strong, definitely on the higher end of the Stalker DPS spectrum. If you want more AoE without going outside Dual Blades for concept reasons (or you like all your attacks to build focus), Thousand Cuts is a decent AoE. I have taken a DB/Ninjtsu stalker to 50. The best thing that I can say about Stalker Ninjitsu is that it has a lot of skippable powers and I found it an inconvenient power set. You get to trade Scrapper's +end power and it's resist and knockback protection power in favor of Caltrops. Now, Caltrops is a fine power, but... you can do better. I am not a fan of clicky mez protection either. But, I enjoyed playing Dual Blades so much that I made the aforementioned DB/EnA and I have nothing but good things to say about the set. If I were to made a "D&D thief" stalker I'd make a DB/SR with the experimentation power pool. Speed of Sound's alternate 'teleport' mode has a much shorter animation time than other teleports so you can literally teleport behind mobs and shank them with the bladed weapons of your choice. The rest of the powers in the pool are pretty cool too, but I am eyeing Corrosive Vial with 4 damage procs and 1-2 -res procs.

I came into this thread hoping someone had made cool paperweights out of the AT logos, because I have been watching too many woodworking + epoxy resin pouring videos on Youtube.

I could be wrong, but I think that the PVP procs do more damage to players than they do to critters.🤔

My thoughts: Core of the build looks good. -Vengeance is way overslotted, and IMO can be comfortably skipped on a Fortunata, since it doubles down on what you're already doing so much of with your Mind Link & Leadership powers. -Lunge is a great attack but as its your only melee attack, I believe you'll be stuck with the claw redraw every time you use it, which - if I understand it correctly - pretty much cuts the DPA in half (idk how long redraw is but lets call it 0.7 sec), so I'm not sure if you're getting the best use out of it. So I'd either take more melee attacks or more likely sawp Lunge (good as it is) for... something. I don't like Psychic Scream though as it's easily the worst of the ranged targeted AoEs and you already have PsiNado, Fences, and Ball Lightning. I like how you slotted Electrifying Fences and I'd copy that slotting onto Ball Lightning. (also I'd swap the PVP proc for the Bombardment proc as it's cheaper and a more exotic damage type) Mind Link you can definitely save a few slots on as the LOTG bonuses aren't great. I prefer the Build Up proc in Aim so that you can control when it procs, but opinions vary. I would pick up a second big control power. The simplest choice to me would be to swap Vengeance for Aura of Confusion (one of the best control powers available) with 5 or 6 pcs of the Coercive Persuasion set. With the contagious confusion proc it usually confuses bosses in one hit if used in a decently sized mob, for a few seconds. If you wanted to get your resistances up you could move a few slots in defensive powers around and find room for a few 4x Shield Wall (in f.ex mind link & TT-maneuvers) which comes with a nice energy/neg energy bonus. (6pc Reactive Defenses is a clean swap for the 6pc Preventive Medicine also).

Every badge in the Shadow Shard. I like to take an hour or so with Fly and Afterburner, chill out, and fly through the zones picking up every badge, with the badge window up so that I can read the descriptions.