roleki

Grav/Storm is just flat out fun to run. No self heal, and kind of meh until you hit 26, but man, does it make up for it. But really, the time you spend 0-26 is a blink compared to the time you spend 26-50, which is when Grav/Storm really picks up steam. Grav/Time is decent, steady stuff with a nice mix of buffs/debuffs from the secondary. Grav/Kin is capable of chunking out some serious ST damage; Wormhole a couple of mobs together, Fulcrum Shift, start whaling.

Considering +Def is pretty much all FF does, it's kind of ridiculous that it DOESN'T do DDR, but something something cottages.

What's your global?

The weird thing is, the more I do to earn inf, the less I need inf. In fact, if I'm kitting out a new 50, when the process is over I usually have more inf than I started with. The only thing I buy off the market are Converters, Hero\Villain Packs, and lately, Kismets. The only thing I dump on the market are orange recipes, white salvage, and catalyzed ATOs. How Why anyone makes it in this game with only a single account is a mystery to me.

Obviously, you think this is some kind of game. Oh wai

ARE YOU CALLING FOR A FOURTH CATEGORY?

Plant/Thorns is also a ridiculous buzzsaw

We are ALL students, in our own way.

Iron Belle? Oh, she's got to be an Emp/Water Defender who goes around distributing essential vitamins and minerals to people.

How about keep the damage where it's at, and ADD crits? Or, some kind of "reverse Scourge" where the more health something has, the more damage a Sentinel does? Or something, I don't know. They gave Controllers Containment when that AT was flagging, and now you're as apt to find a Controller as you would a Scrapper or a Blaster. Me, I'm "happy" with my Sentinels because I treat them like Defenders that traded support powers for armor, instead of lamenting that they are underperforming Blasters or ranged Scrappers. That said, I acknowledge that a team/league would benefit far more from having an actual DPS AT or an actual Support AT in my spot.

Used to be, you'd hit one and you'd need a spotter across the zone to tell you where it landed. You could legitimately fire one so high in the air and so far it would get stuck in the War Wall between zones. But they dialed down the KB somewhere along the line, and now you can barely get one to fly more than 200'. I get WHY they did it, but I wish they'd have a server event or something where everybody in Echo: AP got a 10000% KB enhancement just from being there. You know, for old times' sake.

I have an alt build on my En/En blaster that went this route. I logged on once and there was a Zombie event in progress right underneath me, so I Nova'd, forgetting that the +KB build was active. For some reason, nobody was happy with Zombie Rain. In any event, as was posted earlier in the thread, you don't REALLY need to use the KB:KD enhancement if you're smart about how the KB works, but I usually just slot them anyway. I've already given up chasing MAX DMG! by rolling an EN in the first place, so, what's another 4 or 5% of enhanced damage/acc/rech lost? That said, I love my Kin/En Defender and my En/KIn Corruptor, they're legitimately just fun-to-run perpetual cannons.

I'm like 500 miles from my machine and builds so I can't post it here, but I have what I think is a pretty decent Spines/Fire/Energy Mastery brute that can do fire and s/l farms without problem, running just over 46% Melee Def and just over 86% S/L resists, nothing boosted. Way I figure, by and large the most damaging incoming attacks will be ST Melee, and if I can minimize the effect of those, I can survive the AoE/Ranged stuff just fine, and that seems to be the case when I get on the maps; I might click Healing Flames once in a full cave map. Way I did that was not monkeying around with an EPP that requires a bunch of slots to be effective, leaving some slots to spread around the build for +Melee Def set bonuses. I use 6x Touch of Death in ST attacks, 6x Obliteration in PBAoE, and 4-slotting Unbreakable Guard in Fire Shield and Tough. One of those got the UGuard +7.5% HP enhancement, but whichever one did also got the Steadfast Protection +Res/+Def unique and the Gladiator's Armor +Def unique. As a side effect, I also had slots to add to Stamina/Health to address endurance issues between Ageless hits, and the Shield Wall/Reactive Defenses +Res(All) uniques. I know it's rather unbrutish to skip more AoE attacks in favor of relentlessly wading forward, but it's what I do.

Not forgetting that at all! On those few occasions I needed PFF, by the time I realized I NEEDED PFF, I'd already taken enough damage that the next couple hits, even at ~60% strength, would be enough to make me a grease spot. Back before the Incarnate system was a thing and even yellow IO sets were only for the affluent, I used to 'farm' the wall in Cimerora with my Fire/FF controller; if even one of the Lieutenants-or-better broke containment, they would break containment for the whole mob and next thing I know, I've got multiple jerks farming ME. Even the minions had 6000 attacks, so I had like a microsecond between hearing the "Hyuh! of Death" and actual death. Point being, if you use PFF as a buff to go places you probably shouldn't instead of using it as an ohshi button, that 40% Res(All) is of more benefit.

'Worthless' is a pretty strong word, but only by a shade. In 180-odd levels of running Fire/FF controllers, I've only ever activated PFF in earnest maybe 10 times. That said, I've done so understanding that even with PFF active, everything still has a 5% chance of clobbering me... so I usually only activate it if escape is possible.

In response to the question in the thread title: "As a LotG mule."

This is why I have just been spraypainting https://forums.homecomingservers.com/installation-guide/ on the sides of train cars and bridges throughout the upper midwest and Canada.

If you click on the menu link in the upper right of CoD, you can set it to not show PvP (or show PvP and hide PvE) totals; I find that makes it a LOT easier to parse out what a power actually does.

What's weird is, I somehow manage to have a good time with CoH despite not staggering through content repeatedly. Like right now, I am in the process of optimizing a Beam Rifle/TA Corruptor. So much -Res! Now usually on a /TA I would sell out for positional defense and take Alpha Cardiac to shore up endurance, but all that -Res baked into the build kind of screams out for higher base damage to really take advantage of the mechanics involved; that means Musculature off the bat, and you have to address the endurance issues through set bonuses. Since +End usually doesn't come with any significant +Def, you pretty much end up running around naked but loaded for bear. Unfortunate side-effect of having so much +Damage and -Res: you sort of one-shot even-con minions, but only if you let them linger around for the DoT to count them down, during which time they are free to shoot at you or whatever. Reminder, you are now naked. You can solve this build-wise by dropping Single Shot in favor of Cutting Beam as a low-cost minion rake, even though you'll miss having that extra ST cooldown when tackling harder targets. Point being, if I were trucking characters through content level-by-level, I am confident that I wouldn't be mucking around with the minutiae of a friggin' Beam/TA Corruptor right now because I'd still be mired in the "hero's journey" of some generic-ass Scrapper two years later. If that's "fun" to someone, more power to them and I promise I'll not look as sideways at THEM as they do ME, but as long as I have the choice to do so, I will continue to PL my characters - damning all the dings along the way - in favor of having a stable full of dozens of oddball final builds that I have pored over incessantly to get "just so" because that's how I have a good time.

Fire, mostly, but Beam Rifle is right there with it. Conveniently, both will ignite Oil Slick Arrow.

Not to derail, but I was part of the verrry long Alpha/Beta of Fortnite, and it felt like they had done exactly what you suggested, except instead of focusing on the top two or three answers, they tried to stuff EVERY 'want' into the core game. It was huge in places, unwieldy at times, fun in a general sense, and had the potential to be somewhat deep... but then they just shoehorned PUBG into it, and nobody even knows Save The World even exists. That would have to be one heck of an abridged dictionary to consider "fun" and "enjoyment" synonymous. Consider the following two sentences, neither of which a living human would phrase as such but I did so here in an effort to avoid splitting even more hair... 1: Schindler's List was not a fun movie, but I derived enjoyment from watching it. 2: Schindler's List was not a movie that provided enjoyment, but I had fun watching it. Fun and enjoyment are NOT the same thing.

My brain is just six different monkeys on various stimulants with their tails tied together, so forgive me if this rambles and/or doesn't make a lick of sense either in general or the context of the thread. Honestly, it's the monkeys more than me. When CoH went away, I spent the first few weeks or a month trying various games, never finding anything that seemed capable of holding my interest the way CoH had. Eventually I quit trying to find a replacement game altogether, and started a new hobby - buying Lego collections off eBay/garage sales, cleaning them, sorting them, reconstituting the component sets where possible, then flipping the uninspiring sets back on eBay. At last count, I had about ~380 gallons of Lego left from that sidetrack; to put that into perspective, think of the kid in your neighborhood who had ALL the Lego sets... they probably had about 8 or 9 pounds of the stuff. I'm sitting on ~500 pounds of it, or, about 60 spoiled-kids' worth of Lego. It's a literal boatload of Lego, if the boat in question wasn't too big. Anyway, when I bought that stuff - in lots of five or 10 pounds at a time - it would invariably arrive in a musty old box containing a miasma of bricks, cat hair, random colored pencils, bits of Contrux and Lincoln Logs, rubber balls, Penny Racers and so on. After cleaning the lot, I would turn on a college/NFL game and just spend those three or 4 hours sorting Lego. First macro (bricks, plates, slopes, Technic, etc) then micro (small bricks, medium, wide) then final (1x1 bricks, 1x2 bricks, 1x3 bricks) and so on, occasionally getting little dopamine hits from finding the black sword that only ever came in THIS set, or finding a space guy what still has a crisp logo on his torso, etc. Point I am getting to is this: if it's that boring to READ about sorting Lego, imagine actually doing it. But I kept doing it, because that process of putting the brain in park and reducing the world to a PBAoE was extremely therapeutic and something that just worked for me, even if the overwhelming majority of the time the tasks were repetitive, tedious, and not what we would classically label 'enjoyable.' As a bonus, when I was done, I had SOMETHING to show for it... if you count a couple of extra dollars and 'grounds-for-divorce' amounts of Lego as SOMETHING. So now there's this thread about a video game, wondering what we think of as fun. I don't have "fun" researching the minutiae of a powerset on CoD. It's not "fun" agonizing over whether I would benefit more from a moderate endurance discount if I slot this HERE, or if I should put that slot over here and get a small damage boost to complement all the -Res out of the secondary. It's not "fun" crafting an Air Burst then converting it to a Touch of Lady Grey to a Reactive Defenses to a LotG 7.5% enhancement and stashing it in my base because the next character I have an idea for will need 5 of them. It's not "fun" opening a Hero Pack, finagling that Kheldian ATO to something people actually want, catalyzing it, then dumping it on the market so I can leave placeholder bids for downlevel recipes that I can side-craft into Miracles and Steadfasts while still keeping inf on hand for impulse buys of the same. Defeating thousands upon thousands of custom enemies in a cave is not especially "fun" - though it is a LOT like sorting Lego, with the same neuron-muting qualities that kept me sane in CoH's absence. What *IS* fun to me, is the end result of these tedious activities... I had an idea for a character, sketched it out, leveled it, equipped it just so, tested it, analyzed it, tweaked it, and now I can break it out once every week or so and melt U'Kon G'rey with it or figure out what kind of ITF I've just volunteered for with it, or just smash huge mobs of Nemesis in PI until I get a catalyst and can park the character again. Sometimes, on a character that I felt went particularly well, I'll just open up the Enhancement screen and kind of marvel at it, like I'm Agent Smith looking at the Matrix. And that's it. I guess I'm a destination kind of guy. The 'journey' might have been fun for me at one point, but having done everything 30 or 50 times before, I am well past that. Amassing influence doesn't hold any appeal to me, it's a means to an end, or in this case, 50 or 60 ends. Spending influence doesn't do it for me either, because I was at the other end of the keyboard for every mouse click that earned it, and since that time was worth something to me, I'm not apt to piss it away. I'm here to make builds that work in my own fashion, and I do so in a manner that doesn't rely on the proficiency or availability of others. If that doesn't jibe with the spirit of an MMO or ignores the intentions of the devs... I'm not even sorry, I'm just over here having a good time.

I'm 48 but it feels like I have 2XP enabled and a bar full of patrol XP.

I guess what I like *most* about Sentinels is the flexibility the builds allow. In terms of survivability, Sentinels start out where my Corruptors/Blasters/Defenders could only hope to end up if I chased +Def or +Res set bonuses exclusively. If I want to chase +Recharge or +Damage, or heck, +Movement, I am free to do that because I don't have to go nuts trying to keep the Sentinel upright. Second thing, since survivability is pretty much built into the character, I am free to try new things out of pool powers and Incarnates, unlike pretty much every other AT where I am shoehorning these two out of Leadership, this one out of Leaping, those three out of Fighting, Clarion and so on. Lastly, since nobody expects anything out of a Sentinel, I could take the whole dang Flight pool if I wanted, and not have people giving me side-eye for not making THIS choice or THAT choice, or failing to tuck just the right proc into THAT power. I could post a janky Sentinel build right now, taking all the weird procs like the Tempest proc (go ahead, look it up) and nobody would lean in and say, "you know, if you took THIS instead of THAT and slotted THIS over here, you could really trim your Pylon time down" or whatever, because damn near every Sentinel build is correct. Is it alive? Does it have more than one attack? Looks fine to me!

Are "fun" and "having a good time" peers in this discussion? Because it's been a long while since I had fun, but I "have a good time" whenever I set out to.