roleki

It depends what kind of mobs you're hitting; Circle of Thorns Death Mages at +4 still give my controllers less trouble than blue-con Nemesis lieutenants and minions, especially those little crab automaton things.

Do I have a process? Let me tell you... So I dual-client and PL myself, despite warnings that if I do that I'll go blind. I do it that way because IRL I have maybe 2 hours on any given night to poosh butan, but that 2 hours is spread over 5 hours of making dinner, serving dinner, cleaning up after dinner, working on homework, washing asses, planting sleepy-heads, and all that crap. CoH arrives to me in chunks of 20 to 30 minutes, I'm not going to spend that time team-wiping to a bunch of Vazhilok. So yeah, I dual-client with two farmers on each account; rad/fire brutes and TW/bio scrappers. Since I know I only have about 30 minutes, I'll run Briggs' Outdoor Fire Farm at 2/8 with an alt at the door. I like 2/8 because it's still kinda fast XP for the alt, but it's slow enough that I can still rack up scads of threads/shards on my farmers for Future Use. I like Briggs Comic Con because the variety of dudes I am melting. Anyway, when I get a wild hair about an alt, I will roll it on one account or the other, email myself 3M inf, then visit P2W and provision myself with the requisite buffs and travel powers. Before heading to PocketD AE, I'll knock out the AP parts of the Atlas Medallion because I'm likely not coming back this way for a while. Once at Pocket D, I'll team up with my farmer, hit Comic Con outdoor and plow that; that usually puts my alt at 24.5 after one run. Hop out of the mission, go level-up, expunge drops accordingly, and if I have time, rinse and repeat. Second run is to 31.5, third to 35.9ish. At this point, I've invested between 45 to 75 minutes in that alt, depending on how active I am in Help/LFG and/or how active my cat is at distracting me. Level 35/36 is a good time to park the little guy for a spell, and IF I have time, I'll pick a 50 I haven't been on for a couple days and go beat stuff up with it until a Catalyst drops. If an interesting-looking LFM shows up in chat, I'll do that until either it peters out or I do. Next time I log in, I might repeat this whole cycle, work on a parked alt, or just chase Catalysts the whole time. Since I usually have numerous alts-in-progress and an ever-expanding closet full of 50s to monkey with, I could go two months between creating an alt and bringing it to 50, but in-game mission time, maybe 3 hours, 0-50... offline XP kind of skews the calculation. Earlier I mentioned having two farmers on each ID; that's so when drops start drying up, I can take one farmer out to do radios or farm Striga for Atlas requirements or whatever, and bring the other back in from The World to do AE stuff again. If I notice an inordinate amount of time has passed since a purple flopped out of the RNG, I'll swap out. Maybe it's all for naught, but in my mind it seems I get more purps that way. Anyway, I'm @antigyro that's how I level.

I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the name of the mechanic as implemented in CoH, but it's to accumulate maximum "offline XP." If you have 2XP *and* a full wheel of offline XP, that next level zips by in a blink. It's more useful 45-50 than it is on the journey from 0-45.

Way off topic, but my Dad dropped out of high school, lied about his age and joined the army when he was 15. When the end of his 3year contract came up, they asked him to re-enlist so he could accompany his unit to what they said was "... some place called Viet Nam." Anyway, I didn't even know people were making HC CoH videos, I thought that was verboten. If it is, the team should take a moment to Nova this dude.

This. The *most likely* reason a character is broke at 50 is because they went 2XP the whole way through. While I am sure that - through persistent gaming of the market - you can roll 2XP AND have scads of influence for your alt, that seems too much like "spreadsheets in space" to me. (To ME).

@Coyote Thanks for the explanation; I guess Repulsion Bomb was a bad example. I think when I roll up a FF/En Defender, I'll go nuts on the FF+Recharge and see where that ends up. I've got Nova every 37s on my En/En blaster, but that's leveraging lots of SuddebAccel.

General question: say the 5th or 6th slot of a set got me a 7.5% global recharge bonus. Would I be better off with that, or the FF+Rech proc, in an AoE with say, a 30s recharge and 16 max targets? ETA: I'm thinking specifically of Repulsion Bomb on my Fire/ForceField controller, which is a good opener on most non-Nemesis mobs, but I don't fire it again until next mob. I've currently got it 6-slotted with Sudden Acceleration, because Fire/FF has a thousand extra enhancement slots and SudAcc has a lot of useful bonuses, including the 7.5% recharge. BUT, if I would be better off just one or two-slotting RBomb (acc and FF+Rech) then picking up Fissure and 5-slotting it with FF+Rech and 4x something else, I might lean that route. I had tested this on... Test before but it was difficult to compare results, as the timers on the FF+Rech build were all over the map.

LOL! And just to make up for my content-light reply, I will suggest you try Seismic Smash in place of Fissure. Slotted with procs, it's kind of impressive for an ST attack out of a Controller.

Ill/Dark is a really solid solo performer 1-50; in fact, it may be a little TOO good. After you've got PA and Dark Servant, you kind of become the 4th or 5th best character on screen, in terms of what you're doing affecting the outcome in front of you. That said, Ill/Dark is also useful on teams, which you can hop into whenever you get bored of watching your minions killing everything without significant assistance from you. My own favorite solo controller is my Fire/FF, but since that doesn't have a self-heal I'll mention my second-favorte, Grav/Time. As much as Grav is a slog 1-25, the game changes completely when you pick up Wormhole; now you can break mobs into manageable chunks, and with the buffs/debuffs and extra ST hold out of /Time you can really start delivering beatings. With Singularity in the mix, you're effectively slinging out 2 or 2.5 controllers' worth of mezzes, moving pieces around the map and melting them in short order. I highly recommend it!

Did I just ruin this?

Tanks. Had an Inv/Battle Axe tank that I slow-crawled up to 32 or so. At that point the thought of dragging it to 50 actually became depressing, and I abandoned it. Honestly, I don't think I would have liked a 'better tank' because the mechanics were what bored me to tears.

I went EN/EN first as well; while it wasn't my first 50, it was the character (and power combo) that got me hooked on CoH. Even today, the Energy Blast SFX are still my favorite sound in-game. You just know something's getting lit up when you hear it.

This is so true. I run Controllers almost exclusively, and in my experience, nothing gets all barrels pointed straight at you quicker than CF. If I could find the source code, the first thing I would look at is how Crushing Field is coded, as opposed to say, Fire Cages or Frostbite. Fire Cages literally sets people on fire, and nine times out of ten they will still ignore the caster. But throw a CF at random, and suddenly the AV and their retinue don't care they're getting stabbed repeatedly by a Scrapper; now you're Vengeance fuel. This is why I don't lead with anything that doesn't take the most dangerous target out of the fight, whether I'm a Grav/ or an Ice/ or whatever. I'll still throw a CF in there, but that's like, way down the list of things I might do next.

I faithfully recreated all my 50s from live (matching costumes as best I can from memory/screenshots) with the exception of my Grav/Kin... I initially rolled that as a Grav/Time on HC, but wound up doing a Grav/Kin as well and swapping costumes/names because it didn't "feel" right. I will say this... I don't know if it's because of the Incarnate system or more affordable IOs or more focused set bonuses or a combination of all that, but I'm finding that - unlike Live - every character I roll is viable on HC. Some more than others, of course, but where my Ice/TA on Live made me want to claw my eyes out and he never got out of the garage once he hit 50, my HC Ice/TA is actually kind of a beast. Sure, an agonizingly slow beast, but enough of a beast that I make sure to take him out a couple times a week.

Not trying to start stuff, but, have you played any other games? There is no level of "difficulty" in CoX that actually crosses the threshold of "difficult." Can't rightly trivialize what's already trivial.

Are there really THAT many newbs to CoH? I been back 6 months now, and I've yet to chat in-game with anyone who hadn't played on Live. It could be that all the newbs in my proximity are severely introverted? But, there MUST be newbs, based on the number of times I've been street hunting and had people swoop in to nuke mobs I clearly had handled, or the number of people who go AFK in the Portal parking lot, preventing mobs from spawning. I played Live from Issues 1 through 18, though that last year I barely put any time in, so it really was like 10 years between logins on Live and HC. I have to look up on ParagonWiki how to get to zones ALL THE TIME because WTF is a Night Ward and where is Crey's Folly again? It's not because I'm a newbie, it's because I'm an old. Though, I at least remembered how to get to PI. ETA: holy crap, between retail boxes and subscription fees, I slopped out over 1200.00 for this game. Not to mention the PhysX card I bought because the game I was really into at the time implemented PhysX support.

That would be very useful, as asking to PL isn't really LFG and the constant squawking for PL does detract from the usefulness of LFG. Maybe someone could come up with a matchmaking service that will link people looking for PL with people offering to PL. They can call it "OptNotToGrindr" or something.

This iteration of CoH appeared out of nowhere, and could just as easily disappear before I finish typing this post. That, coupled with the fact that this time around I have a family and commitments to keep, and it seems prudent to ME that I maximize the ROI of any time I spend logged in. For ME, that means chunking out 50s and refining their build until they do exactly what I set out to do with them. For other people, that might mean doing all the arcs all the time or badging a main, or nailing that costume, or whatever it is people do. Bottom line, my belief is that we should all spend our in-game time doing what WE enjoy doing, on the very real chance that this could all wink out of existence the breath after next. ETA: so I guess if that means paying someone else inf to PL your toon, so be it, even though I personally find the idea kind of gross.

Rolled something!

I'll be there with something Icy; thinking maybe Ice/Traps or Ice/Rad.

If someone wants to run farms, it's their time, fine by me. If someone wants to pay to door sit, that's their choice, fine by me. What I *do* object to is people advertising to PL for compensatuon X; it seems... tacky and unnecessary, and it puts an unnecessary spotlight on PL/farming when there are already people who strenuously object to that method of play without the added attention and notoriety that comes with advertising to do it for even more profit.

What server is that on? Unless it's specifically advertised as a speed run, every PuG/TF I've joined on Indom runs +4/8, and if it isn't +4/8, it gets brought up quickly. I wasn't aware that THAT was in any way abnormal.

Fair enough, I can move my 50 Ice/TA to Everlasting, or, I can roll a new one if that's the preferred approach. Either way, an 8-wide Ice/ team sounds like too much fun not to do.

While I haven't specifically sought out AVs to solo, I will say my TW/Bio scrapper has fared very well against the AVs we run into in PuGs/TFs. I've often wound up soloing whatever AV is in front of me, and, aside from stepping in blue lightning because I didn't know what it was, my Tw/Bio has never died. Never. Just be advised that both TW and Bio are kind of, well, not "technical" but you have to make some choices of how you'll run, and your attack chain isn't always a straight 1,2,3,4 progression, especially if you've factored Defensive Sweep into your survival strategy.

I'm in, 9:00PM EST any day you want to run it. But what server?