roleki

AKA players are undergoing stability testing. EDIT: prognosis negative

I understand being disappointed that one of your characters' name got changed, but imagine how much more disappointed you'd be if you went to log onto HC and it didn't exist anymore over something as stupid as fucking Doja-Cat.

Curious, what gives you that impression? In my experience, Poison and TA absolutely neuter hard targets, and in the case of TA, removes everything BUT the hard targets from the encounter.

Hence the beauty of CoH in 2022. Nothing is 'needed' and nothing is a hinderance. Teams no longer have to fellate the tank in the hopes they don't ragequit and leave the other 7 players unable to continue. TFs can pull out of the station without an EMP. If a side-effect of the "ATs don't matter" flexibility is that I can solo 4/8 stuff on a Fire/FF controller, that's not nearly as bad for the game as forcing specific team compositions as a requirement in general content, especially in an environment where the playerbase isn't nearly as vast as it was during live. But really, de-emphasizing S/L def isn't that big of a change; it's not like they're suddenly making oxygen poisonous and pushing cyanide as a vitamin. Some things we're used to stomping on with impunity MIGHT hit harder with SOME attacks. If your preferred build can't handle such a minor change, how could it possibly have survived the harder content that people keep clamoring for? Put it this way, for all the doom and gloom in this thread, I bet people are still running endless PI radios vs. Council long after P4 drops. There'll still be DIB/DFB spam in LFG. As long as it never devolves to "50/4 PI radios lf healer pst" or some variation thereof, I'm fine with it and really have a hard time imagining why anyone else would be so wounded by the very idea of it - especially if they haven't even tried it on test. The people reporting back, they're not lying! It's not that bad! As for people asking why this change, and why now... it's possible that this change clears a path for future development in an area we're not even thinking of on this side of the executable. Maybe it's just the result of a wild hair doing what wild hairs do. Hard to say, when the devs aren't. But if I had a tinfoil hat - and I do - I would point out that making exotic damage types more of a concern for the average build may push people to think of slotting the 5th and 6th pieces of a set to address that damage, whereas now those slots might have been filled with procs; that would in effect free the devs from having to make an even more unpopular move, like overhauling the proc system. Or maybe they were hoping that the Attack Typing adjustment would combine with the new aggro behavior to simultaneously sideline procs and make farming a little more hands-on, and maybe even make FF great again in the process. In that light, the real question isn't "Why are the devs doing this?" but rather "Why do you hate FF so much?"

Funny thing about threads like this, you rarely see multiple people post the same exact combo as their favorite. Moreover, I have two accounts that are each ~4 pages deep on two servers, so that's like what, 150 or 160 characters? And I almost never have what other people are evangelizing. For a rock/paper/scissors emulator, this game is crazy diverse.

That's really interesting. I have no doubt people have complained about losing Emp -> RM, but I've either blind-eyed it or missed it entirely, so I can't speak to the motivation behind the complaint from those corners. What I do know is that to me, RMs are just enhancement converters, and there would have to be a massive sea change to get me to spend inf to buy converters on the market. That (multiple?) other people are complaining about losing the conversion makes me wonder if I am not alone in my aversion to actually using inf to BUY things; to me, the market is just where I shit out the imperfect tarts from the yellow->orange->random rare minigame. If there ARE more of us than anybody realized... well, those of you still stuck using the market may be in for some challenges a couple months down the road from Page 4. Myself, I don't convert Emps to RMs because I know I won't be getting any more of those outside of what trickles in when the alts ding while they're out of the barn every third or fourth week. In that way, Emps are worth more than RMs or converters.

Not CoH.

It would be easier to list what I haven't liked, but, where's the fun in that? On live, I settled on Controllers because I liked the idea that my survival was down to how well I meshed what I COULD do with what I could prevent the bads from doing, instead of being a one-trick pony that relied on a boatload of HP or damage output to steamroll. I could go on all day about how amazing Gravity/Storm is at creating and taming chaos, or how funky Ice/TA is with its over-the-top slows and debuffs, or the crushing inevitability of Mind/Poison - they're confused, they're asleep, there goes their resistance, boom, they're dead - and I will never miss an opportunity to implore folks to try Fire/FF themselves to see how much fun you can have when you mix a metric shit-ton of fire with a similar amount of KD. There are very few controller combos that I don't absolutely love. That said, once I exhausted the controller combos I wanted to try out, I discovered Corruptors and holy crap, I haven't found a bad one yet. My instant favorite was a Fire/TA (so many SCOURGE! messages appear on the horizon) but as much as I like that build, I am having an even better time with a Rad/Rad/Dark running Choking Cloud and Oppressive Gloom; it turns 4/8 into 4/1 just by farting radiation everywhere, and while everyone is standing around wondering whether to be stunned or held, might as well Soul Drain and treat them to steady diet of AoEs. Easily the closest thing I've found to a scrapper/controller hybrid and just a lot of fun to work with. Speaking of Scrappers, Spines/Bio is just loaded with answers but really doesn't need them because mobs just melt into a pile at its feet. I like that. And if I'm ever incapacitated, I run my 3-button Claws/WP, which I can keep up with.

Weird, Trip Mine is the finisher on my Ill/Traps.... deploy PA with a target macro so the mob is engaged, Jaunt in behind, drop Trip Mine, Poison Trap, boogie over to the next mob. I rarely have to use more powers than that, until I get to 3/8, 4/8 stuff.

Oh, you would love my Demons/EA mastermind. Thing is a steamroller, but it's just a constant stream of ROOOOOWWR BZZZT BZZZT BZZZT ROOOOOWWR BZZZT BZZZT

Generally speaking, a Tank. Chances are good you're going to have a Tank on your team anyway, it might as well be the one running the show. That way you can herd or not herd however the hell you want to. I realize this is completely anecdotal, but seems every time I've been in a PuG run by a non-Tank, no matter how well that team is running and playing off each other, the whole damn thing goes to hell when some Tank pops in from LFG and all of the sudden now we're playing THAT way, or NOT playing that way and there's grumbling, death, and less fun. Usually the Superfluous Tanks (STanks) will defer to the team lead if it's a Tank, unless you have the misfortune of stumbling onto an unusually meatheaded STank.

My rad/fire(s) don't rely on procs in IG precisely because procs have long been rumored for a balance pass. Even without taking advantage of proc-fu, they're my most consistent farmers. Second on that list is a Spines/Bio scrapper; with a couple D-syncs in Parasitic Aura and some heal/recharges the rest of the way, it survives/clears a 4/8 with relative ease.

If you look back at the history of anti-AE whining on the forum, they whined for AE changes and we wound up with less rewards in AE. They whined some more and no-XP was removed. They kept whining and they almost got vet rewards removed, but instead they got Emp-> Merits removed. Every time someone whines about AE, it's directly converted into a solid "fuck you" to a very large portion of the playerbase. So yeah, I get a little pissed because every time the devs bring whine-infused changes to the game, the game gets shittier for one pool of players, and not one whit better for any other pool of players. And still, not one person has been able to show me proof that farming affects them in any way, other than "Farmers have more stuff than I do."

Depends what you're planning to hit with it. I usually shoot for +4, and make room for a Kismet +ToHit (FKA Kismet: Accuracy) accordingly. In most cases, a little bit of +ToHit goes farther than a LOT of +Acc, but you kind of need a combination of slotted Accuracy, global Accuracy bonuses, and global ToHit bonuses to really smack the big bads; you have to do some finagling to give yourself the same chance to hit a +4 as you would a +0. Such finagling would be similar to what follows:

Cheating the question a little, but hands-down my favorite 'content' is running Halloween leagues in PI. Do a little ToT in between hunting GMs, with the occasional Banner/Zombie event thrown in, plus the little mini-game of managing invite snipes, lining up my Incandescent folks, trying to establish some semblance of balance in team composition when people are adding and dropping every 2 minutes, making sure the Tip mission kids get paired off, keeping track of the 50s so I can move them around when one team suddenly drops to lvl 14, working the chat to identify a successor for when I have to bail... it's a whole thing. What's weird is, I cannot stand leading teams, but ToT Leagues, with all this extra horsecrap, I jump right in. Anyway, once the event is over, I go back to farming alts and I only pop out of AE to do MSRs or the occasional ITF or whatever.

Thinking an Ice/Kin Controller; with Arctic Air, you'll definitely be moving faster than everything around you, and you can sap even more speed from them with... Siphon Speed. The confuse from Arctic Air will effectively imitate the hapless flailing around that is often depicted when street level people attempt to confront a speedster, and the Ice Slick will further the sense of exaggerated clumsiness. Meanwhile, you'll be in melee so you'll get some benefit from Fulcrum Shift, so, that's a benefit, too. And frankly, Ice is just fun if you lean into the slows. You wouldn't think massive slows would be an effective defense, but it works out really well.

I wish the devs would just come out and tell us "We're seeing X, so we're doing Y, in order to Z." Look what happens in the absence of that; there's accusations of a secret cabal, suggestions that would send farmers to Ceti Alpha V, instant 50s nobody asked for... it's not pretty.

Thanks, @JJDrakken - you didn't know it, but you helped me figure out how to wedge Fold Space into my Thugs/Emp. Many thanks!

Welcome to Ill/Traps, it's a heck of a ride and has two of the most underrated powers in the game in Spectral Terror and Acid Mortar. Definitely skip Time Bomb, that power is ass incarnate. I like Seeker Drones and try to fit them into every /Traps build, but Illusion has PA for alpha so you wouldn't miss Drones THAT much if you couldn't fit them in. As for Triage Beacon... it's a good slot mule, and maybe all that +regen is noticeable on characters with lots of HP, but as the owner of it, you're not going to benefit a lot from it. Definitely lean into Acid Mortar; if you build for perma-PA you'll end up able to chunk out a few at a time and they each rain -Def/-Res all over the place.

Of course not, just having a little fun with the assignment is all. If I hadn't had to make dinner for floppy malnourished children, I was going to record a third video of the same character going into a Malta map or something, to give you what you were actually asking for.

Is it though?

Well, if you insist. (Sorry for quality, YT assures me they've got their best hamsters working around the clock to process the HD version)

Sir, what you are suggesting is the ultimate AFK farming. But nah, that's a great idea. There are a lot of bases I walk into and I can't even fathom that they used the same toolset that I do.

We also don't know if it counts people who have actually stopped to read the EULA, or any keepalives for accounts that exited unnaturally via dc/crash, etc. I suspect the real number is whatever each server's hero/villain count is. But as @Troo pointed out, it could be Jamie Madrox.