roleki

If you read the patch notes and they gave you even the slightest inkling of concern, I would highly suggest heading to the beta server and trying the subject changes out for yourself and get your feedback into the relevant focused thread ASAP. The track record for "first suggestion wins" around here is staggering.

Illusion Dominators? ::swoon::

Agh, you're killing me. You're supposed to say "Nobody is even ToTing, I think they're respectfully waiting for you to get out of work, @roleki!"

Oh man. Halloween Event is live now and I'm stuck earning money so I don't die from starvation or exposure to the elements. I *knew* I should have transferred my consciousness into a robotic chassis when I had the chance years ago.

https://youtu.be/evz9-hxS5NU

Oh, you rolled a Sentinel?

Love Fire/TA, it's honestly one of my favorite characters. I like the idea of Power Boosted TA, but I slot for ranged def over recharge. How's the survival going full recharge?

Thanks @JJDrakken! I do like me a good Sentinel!

I am going to try that next, as - apparently - a DB/Stone stalker is not the way to do it. At 25 I just don't have enough slots in the right places to handle +1s and +2s that are everywhere I want to be. Have to say, I didn't imagine this little project was going to be such an endeavor, but now I kind of HAVE to do it.

I may try that; I've never done Stone Armor because people used to complain about Rooted or whatever. I know that's no longer a thing, but it's still carried over in my brain that there's inconveniences built into Stone. I might only slot up one ST and one AoE, and pour the rest into armor. It's not the kill speed that is deterring me so far, it's the constant health maintenance. I just want to liiiive. I hadn't considered a Stalker, have never run one of those. Being sneaky would come in handy... I wonder how Stone is on a Stalker??

As we are heading into the fall, I got the idea to solo something through the Croatoa content, but most everything I have in that range is extremely floppy and between terrible offense and having to retreat to heal, it takes about 8 minutes to defeat a random smattering of Fir Bolg. Unappealing! So, if you were going to solo through Croatoa (theoretically), what would be the AT and combo of choice? I was thinking a Brute or Tank, but which, I do not know. There's a lot of Fire, Lethal/Smashing and Energy/Negative energy going on in that zone, so maybe instead of resist-based armor I should be looking at Shield/Nin or something? Any ideas? What would make it less of a slog?

I had to retire my MA/WP (RIP Vladimir Bootin') and replaced him with a MA/Nin; I'm glad I had to because those two sets just go together so well, just an endless flurry of limbs. Love that combo. My main, if there is such a thing, would be Burner Account or Tootboy; they're identical Fire/FF controllers that leverage high Def and KD to survive, while melting everything around them to nubbins with their AoEs and immortal Imps. They're just beautiful contraptions.

Pretty much this. I only take Leadership on characters that are in the rear with the gear. Otherwise, I build with the goal of not needing attention from the people in the rear with the gear. That's not being selfish, that's being a good teammate - it frees up the support types to concentrate their efforts on patching up the teammates with selfish builds, or, god forbid, bringing their debuffs and attacks to bear on the mob we're trying to mow through. It's not that I don't appreciate support types, in fact, that's mainly what I run. I just don't like the dynamic of a glass cannon that needs (expects?) dedicated support staff to remain upright. While that is a 'thing' in comic books (like, Cloak & Dagger) it's not THE thing in comic books, and it would suck if it was THE thing in CoH. Luckily, it's not.

Oh, I do all that, Clarion, Boosters, and so on. If something is going to blow ME up, they're going to have to work at it. But I still don't like the def/res I can get on a blapper. I'm going to take @Frostbiter's suggestion and try /Ice, maybe that's where it will make sense.

When you say it takes a lot more effort to make a tanky Blaster, what exactly IS that effort? I've attempted blapper builds but I never get them off paper because I can't get the numbers to a point where I would be confident it would survive in melee. The closest I've come has been on a rad/rad/dark Corruptor, where Choking Cloud and Oppressive Gloom make it 1 vs 1 with 13 spectators, but even that is a little janky because all it takes is 1s of mez and it's all over.

Matter of perspective, I suppose. I rarely do TFs, so VL is pretty much my only source of Emps. Flip side, I roll up hundreds of RMs a week doing MSRs, and clear a few thousand running monster hunting teams over the course of the ToT event, although that isn't as lucrative as it was when we had 3x the pop.

Pretty much this... Reward merits are a LOT easier to get ahold of than Emp merits; I wouldn't even consider trading Emps for RMs in an environment where members of the HC team quasi-openly posit that the Vet Level Emps should never have been included in the 'live' game, which signals Emps will eventually be even harder to come by.

I'm partial to Corruptors because, even though they only approach Blaster damage under certain conditions, the whole time they are making everyone else on the team more effective via buffs/debuffs and therefore "bring" more DPS, albeit in a roundabout way. In other words, the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force (multiplier).

Maybe your family shouldn't hang around on asteroids knowing full well they only have two attacks, neither of which deal exotic damage.

Yeah well, when you need the Bomb Specialist badge, THEN you'll want a Corruptor on your team!

It's not *that* strange if you think of it in terms of a (probably) older playerbase who has to mow the lawn and take the kids to soccer and all that domesticated stuff on the weekends, but have a couple hours free on weeknights. I've been keeping tabs on server population for the better part of two years, and based on my random grabs over that time, if people really are leaving in droves, then others are arriving in droves. Not much more than ~10% difference on any given date/time sample, comparing 3PM EST on one Friday to another, and so on. But I've been looking at the Server Status page, not Discord.

Driving them around, P4 has been a mixed bag for my Ice controllers. Let me preface this by saying I use Flash Freeze in place of Glacier because while soloing, Flash Freeze might as well be Glacier only it's up more often, while in teams, nobody would notice an AoE hold if it fell out of the sky, landed on their face and started to wiggle, so why carry one around that's only up every 3rd mission or so? All that said, Ice Slick was kind of a "cooldown" that I dropped while in melee after things started waking up from Flash Freeze, but now that Ice Slick breaks sleep I have to keep Slick in my pocket a little longer. On THAT specific front, P4 has kind of changed the dance a bit, not good or bad, just, changed. On the other end of the spectrum, I used Cold Snap (RIP Shiver) as an opener before Flash Freeze, then would close to melee and get to work. I still do that, but I've seen a clear reduction in alpha with the new Fear effect in Cold Snap, so that is a change that has been very useful to ME. The added damage in Ice Slick should be great for MSRs, where you get merits against any Rikti you damaged that eventually dies. It's probably a decent proc mule with that long recharge, but I'm not into that stuff these days. On the whole, I think Ice gets a bad rap because people tend to only think of a set in terms of what kind of orange numbers it produces; nevermind that BEFORE P4 Ice was one of the most effective control sets, what with all the -SPD, -Rech, Confuse, KD, Immob, Sleep, and Holds. Adding Fear to the party has just made it that much better. The damage in Ice Slick is nice to chip away at minions and, in theory, should lead to an uptick in VMs awarded in an MSR, but it still lags behind other sets in orange numbers, which, I am FINE with because in practice, I feel much more like a 'Controller' when I am running an Ice/xx than I do running most anything else.

Farming is gameplay. Full stop. Is the executable running in the foreground? Am I interacting with it? Then I'm playing the game. Whether I'm dawdling in the costume creator, standing around in a costume contest, role-playing in a sewer, triggering epilepsy in an MSR, running PI radios vs Council for 50 straight missions, doing DFB until my eyes bleed, hot-footing it between zones to get badges, PvPing in an arena, zone, or Wentworth's... I'm playing the game. Basically, every activity a player can engage in while the executable is in the foreground and they are interacting with it, is playing the game. Except farming? No. And to state otherwise is ridiculous; to claim I am 'lying' or being disingenuous is horseshit. I am playing the game. I don't come in here shitting on any other style of gameplay, and so far I haven't seen an avowed farmer do anything of the sort. And aside from RP and the varuous formats of PvP, I've never seen anyone look sideways at any other style of gameplay. No. That's only reserved for farming. And why? Out one side of their mouth, anti-farming folks will tell you it's because of inflation. And out the other side, they'll tell you IOs are too cheap. So which is it? Hint: it's neither of those. It's the old "they got more than me" bullshit that most people have outgrown during their developmental stages, but is somehow construed as a valid concern in this game. And how does my having 'more' than this person or that person affect them? Not one whit. Market prices? Stable. Server population? Damn near flat since the majority of COVID restrictions were lifted. Does farming flood the game with 50s who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground? It might do exactly that, but there are plenty of sphincter-uncertain people waving the "ban farming" flag in these forums, you don't see me blaming Dr. Trevor Seaborn for it. Just because you're on the treadmill of contact->mission->level->contact doesn't mean you're an idiot amused by shitty storytelling, or a simpleton what needs incremental rewards to remind yourself you're having a good time - just like my killing 33000 straight NPCs who happen to be wearing the same costume doesn't indicate that I'm an idiot amused by tedious tasks, or a simpleton what needs billions of inf to feel I've accomplished something. I just happen to prefer 50s over 1s, 50s over 13s, 50s over 33s and even 50s over 49s, whereas some people seem to really enjoy the progression, like they have a surprise waiting at the end or something. Farmers don't shit on that. So why all the shitting on farming? Why does it even appear on your radar? I'm way the hell over here, doing THIS, you're way the hell over there, doing THAT. And now that AE has (rightly) been removed from the loading zones, we may never cross paths in-game, aside from maybe when you buy stuff off me at the market. I apologize for the convenience. And for the record, I never said that "content was equal to farming" I merely presented a visual aid to combat the notion that farming wasn't playing the game, when it absolutely IS playing the game in every possible sense of the word. I can't launch excel.exe and minutes later have a bunch of inf in CoH. I can't level up a Defender playing Rocket League. To get inf in CoH and level up a Defender, I have to launch CoH and use the varuous inputs and .dlls and whatnot associated with that executable and that executable only. I'm playing the game. And if I'm coming off a little heated, it's because I rather don't appreciate being accused of "being disingenuous at best, and lying at worst" when the entire girth of the accusation is based on a willful misinterpretation of what I actually said. To be honest, it was awesome to find CoH again, and it was great for a while there, but coincidental to players whining to the devs about farming and the devs diligently chipping away at it ever since, the whole spirit of the game and the community had changed, and not for the better. You never saw threads like this back then. Now it's all you see. Well this, and forced attempts at NOT this. Progress!

I'm always down for practical onomatopeia in the wild.

I have the same outfit on my Elec/Dark Controller, "Spastic Colonial."