roleki

I would never take WoC on its own (like, on a character that doesn't have any other confuse powers) but it is rather effective on characters like my Mind/Psi Dominator.

I'm a huge fan of Trick Arrow, both the original version and the new amped-up version, but personally I find it's too slow to take the place of an EA in actual difficult content. Not slow as in arcana time, but slow in the sense that you have to fire off four or five separate debuffs before you're 'set' for a spell. That takes an eternity when there's NOT instant death raining around you. EA 'wins' by delivering immediate relief all over the map, over and over and over. The fact that it carries a PBAoE break free that you can fire off every 5s or so doesn't hurt; Trick Arrow's EMP arrow is awesome, but that 300s recharge makes it almost situational. Don't get me wrong, TA is fantastic - I use them to melt GMs and AVs all the time - but if I look around and see the team is lacking in support, I grab an EA.

"Alone."

Call me crazy, but I use it for the -500% regen. Don't get me wrong, a ranged, autohit, AoE stun is nice, but it's only Mag 2 and only hits in a 15' circle... anything it could stun is probably already dead by the time THAT LOUDASS SOUND STOPS PLAYING.

Sure thing; I'll admit it looks a little sloppy but it trucks like crazy.

Depending on what you want to do, there are numerous ULTIMATE MSR builds. Pushers, Pullers, Crowd Control, DPS, Health & Lifestyle coaches... there's a plethora of roles to fill in an MSR, and all of them have their own ULTIMATE build. Myself, I've tagged along on about 32000 MSRs with about 1000 different characters, but my favorites tend to be Middlers, which is an unofficial role I just invented and classified exactly 4 seconds ago. Instead of being CRITICAL to the success of an MSR, a good Middler will bring a little heat (DPS) and a little lettuce (Buff/Debuff) to the party. You're not the star of the show, but you're not a Sentinel, either. You're not useless during the Pylon Phase because you're debuffing the poo out the obelisks and spitting out what ST damage you can. You're helpful vs the GM as your AoEs (damage/support) help keep your team upright and the opponents... downright? Then when the fur really starts flying, your AoEs are making little orange tickmarks on everything that appears onscreen, and that's how Vanguard Merits are made. My favorite such characters are Fire/TA Corruptors and my EA/Dark Defender. Here's why... It's the Ranged AoEs, Stupid! But really, it is. Beyond bringing some of the best general-purpose debuffs in the game, a full-bore Fire/TA has nukes and patches poking out of every pocket. Sometimes, I pan around the bowl just to see the litany of orange numbers I have wrought stretching as far as the eye can see... and oh, hey Rain of Fire is up AGAIN. Blorp! On the flip side, EA/Dark isn't a TON of help during Pylons (you've got some stacking -Regen?) but once you get to the bowl... a little secret about Dark Blast, it's full of bigass cones. Bigass cones that hit everything everywhere and recharge real fast. Remember, that's how Vanguard Merits are made. Then there's EA, which smart people know is an awesome support set, but still it gets kind of overlooked by many players. You can heal one side of the bowl, and set absorb shields on the other, and by the time you're done, you can do it in reverse. If you are the kind of person who likes the Medical Specialist Badge, that's how you get one of those. In Faraday Cage, you have a Clarion that you can fire every 12s or so, provided you've got the recovery to back it. Think of it, gentlemen... hoof and mouth disease, a thing of the past! Plus, you can Amp (someone) Up; I usually fire off Power Build Up before I Amp (someone) Up... I don't know if it works the way I think it works, but I can tell you this, if I don't immediately put a Power-Built-Up absorb shield on that Power-Built-Upped Amped (someone) Upped person, they'll die from withering fire within seconds. So there's something wiggling around there. But anyway, I would be remiss if I did not mention that an All-Defender MSR is happening on Indom at 9PM EST on Saturday, 16th of July; be on Indom, be a Defender, be at least level 35, and be a Member of Vanguard, and YOU can be part of something you'll tell your kids about someday, and then, they'll grow up to tell their therapist about it. ETA: @Hyperstrike You're not wrong, but there's no such thing as overwhelming defense when the lowest chance to get hit is always 5 and there are "aggro cap to the aggro capth power" bad guys shooting at YOU. That's why it takes a village!

Demon/Electrical Affinity is pretty snazzy on its own but even better in a MM duo... EA has some skippable powers (Defibrilate and Amp Up), and what you DO take out of the secondary doesn't require a whole lot of slotting to be effective. That leaves you some room to play around in the build. Then when it gets out on the ground, the chain heal/buffs are perfect for addressing the needs of henchdemons who like to go downrange; it even helps keep the little demonlings from Hell on Earth upright for an unnaturally long time. I used duo my Demons/EA a lot with a Bots/FF MM and that was a pretty tight combo, summons were basically immortal. That said, that is basically the case with Demons/EA while soloing, so the second one could be more of a debuffer like Dark or Rad.

That seems so weird to me; am I the only one rolling a ton of alts because I want to go out and do stuff with them once they're finished?

Hardly necessary, but I would like to see holds/stuns/immobilizes etc get the same treatment that Slows got with Ice Mistral's Torment, and if it's not too much to ask, both a yellow version and an orange.

As far as I know, the bonuses are calculated individually and added together. The engine seems to do these calculations out to four digits, while the UI only goes up to 2, so the numbers are always a little fudged if you're going off values in the UI.

Sentinels start out as survivable as an IO'd Blaster/Corruptor, which gives us some flexibility in chasing other, weirder bonuses/effects if we'd like. I also like that there's not a rubber-stamped "everyone runs one of these" builds in this AT like there are in every other. You're kind of free to fly your freak flag on a Sentinel; that comes at the cost of DPS.

I love my EM/Fire Brute; you hear a lot about how EM is great at single-target, but with /Fire it's pretty good at AoEs as well. I can throw my build up when I get home, but it's EM/Fire/Energy, not Pyre Mastery.

/jranger I'd be curious to see what other farmers are doing with their influence; unless I'm ducking under the 2BN cap or buying oddball inspirations, I don't spend a dime at the AE. Influence is meaningless, drops are where it's at.

And this is one of the milder threads on the subject. On these very forums, I have had someone tell me I would never be able to "woo a woman" (their words) because I PL. And they were dead serious. I've had people attribute all sorts of personality/character flaws to my preference for PLing - laziness, compulsive behavior, and so on. I've had people accuse me of being dimwitted because I can somehow derive entertainment from looping through the same mission over and over and over; presumably that person then logged off and ran out to Investigate Clockwork Activity In The Warehouse for the 4000th time without a drip of self-awareness. Whenever the slings and arrows begin to take their toll on me, I just think of this and I remember why I am here.

I've seen that suggested before - and if the devs want to implement such a thing that's great - but aside from trying it out of curiosity, I don't see myself using such a feature. The farmer farms the alt up to 50~6, and the drops from both go to kit out the alt. I only use the AE to buy H/V/W packs and occasionally stock up on inspirations, and I would like to keep it that way. That said (and barring unforeseen consequences) I do not think I would begrudge someone who wanted a buttonized 50; I'd just be interested in knowing how they'll make up the gap in influence/drops. ETA: Thinking about it a little more, @Luminara has the right of it... a 50 button would kill the AH in seconds. It would all but cinch off most of the 1-49 recipes/enhancements, and flood the market with 50 recipes. The impact on casual/Right Way players would just be too immense to justify.

I started playing CoH just before Issue 2 dropped, and stuck around until a month or so before Issue 19. I lived through the days where you could do Frostfire 7 times in a row, but if the team petered out before YOUR Frostfire mission was completed, you didn't get credit for it. Now you're level 12 and nobody wants to help you fight a bunch of greys, might as well reroll or try to solo it. After paying out roughly 1100.00 in subscription fees to do so, I walked away with maybe 5 or 6x 50s and numerous alts in various states of advancement, all leveled-up through content. Point being, I've been through the content - especially low-level content - one million times. I've no desire to do it a million-and-one times, let alone a million-and-200 times or however many alts I have. I PL stuff because I really don't care about the journey; I only care that I have new stuff to trot out to a PuG or an ITF or an MSR or whatever. So yeah, if they were to shut off XP in AE, I would just go back to farming particularly advantageous missions outside of AE.

Love Ill/Traps, thing's a wrecking ball. Here's how I did it, but there are a couple things I might change... I like the set bonuses out of Preventive Medicine in Triage Beacon, but I never use the dang thing. I almost never use Phantasm, either - dumb sumbitch only approaches close enough to alert everyone else to my presence, which is unhelpful in most situations.

I feel like Energy/Energy Blaster should go on the list. Dont see them much on HC, but good lord they were everywhere on Live.

Pretend for a second there are three general types of 'interests' among CoH players. On one end of the spectrum, you have hardcore marketeers, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have hardcore farmers; in the middle you have casual gamers arranged from "does some marketeering, just plays content, does some farming." Now, the hardcore farmers and the hardcore marketeers, these are the entrenched people, the people who keep CoH spreadsheets and whatnot - they're not going anywhere. But the casual gamers in the middle, they're less-committed, more apt to wandering off to the next game or whatever. So say as the playerbase dwindles, you lose some marketeers and some farmers, but you lose far more casual players. The middle just hollows out, and you're left with marketeers and farmers. Is it such a stretch to believe that the marketeering that went unnoticed when there was a much larger playerbase would be far more apparent when there's not as many people just using the AH as intended?

I don't bother storing salvage in a base, I just have a zillion alts with ~272 pieces of yellow salvage, ~70 random rare IOs, and some odd number of random recipes on their person. Just need to log in to one of the alts, stand next to the nerd who needs salvage or whatever, and mule it over. It's all very tidy.

In this environment, the winning play might be to simply not play at all. If you farm enough, you'll never need to spend a drop of influence, aside from burning 100M here and there on Superpacks to keep below 2BN.

And when you step out of that farm and pay the marketeer-driven prices, you'll be exhibit A of farmers ruining the market.

One thing I have settled on is 3 pieces of Touch of the Nictus and three pieces of Preemptive Optimization in Drain Psyche. Slotted that way, even a small mob leaves me at ~64hp/s regeneration and capped on Endurance Recovery, which is *really* nice considering that, of the 10 different ways I have tried running Mind/Psi/Psi, the only recurring theme among them has been "Goodbye, Endurance."

Love Fire/TA, and yours looks pretty decent. That said, if you could find a way to squeeze Glue Arrow into the build, try it out because that giant Slow patch helps keep mobs in your AoEs and therefore, helps you kill things dead faster. Also, maybe you're getting good mileage out of EMP Arrow slotted that way, but its crazy recharge time has prevented me from ever investing more than a couple of Recharge Reduction IOs in it. If you're ever looking to punch up another power/effect, steal slots from EMP Arrow. If this posts correctly, the build below is what I had been running, but I think I have moved some slots around since posting it. I'm definitely kicking around the idea of dropping a power in favor of a real travel power, but it's super tough trying to figure out what to drop as I have a use case for everything else in the build, even EMP Arrow.

That's it? Someone brought a slightly undercooked Blaster? It's not like the guy tried to bring a fully T4'd Sentinel to a PUG hoping nobody would notice.