roleki

I don't often agree with @jubakumbibut seems to me y'all are shooting the messenger here. There most assuredly IS an undertone of moral superiority that comes out whenever a thread about the in-game economy bubbles up, and that is soon followed by the calls to outlaw AE, strip its rewards further, or "just buttonize" 50 or suggesting people just play on Test "...because they're skipping the game anyway..." These are suggestions that marginalize the experience of other players, assigning a status of 'lesser' to those who somehow find enjoyment in the behavior you condemn. It's especially passive-aggressive to come in here suggesting changes to the system that your bad-math-brain thinks will affect you naught. To be quite honest, this world already has too many people trying to force others to live by THEIR rules, we don't need it in video games on top of it. To that end, I will always support any effort to stuff the control clowns back into their car.

That's any /Time I've ever run. I can count on one hand the number of times that a chain of Time Crawl -> Time Stop -> Slowed Response-> Attack have all hit.

This. While flipping lumps of brown stuff into gold is the most efficient method of padding your wallet in CoH, it doesn't move the needle on leveling a character or exercising a build, so FOR ME, it's not something I am interested in. That said, just to give it a fair shot I spent about 30 minutes last night converting slows and sleeps to Resistance/EndMod/Healing procs and made about 40M. Still not my cup of tea, but, it appears to be a working strategy.

My experience is skewed a bit because I generally only farm my own alts, but even funneling purples, PVPs and evergreen stuff like Red Fortune/LotG from the camper to the farmer, the camper hits 50 holding a good 15M in inf just from selling common IOs to NPC vendors. That's not a LOT, but if I had let them keep the good stuff, they'd be sitting on about 90-120M, which is about halfway to a middle-of-the-road IO build. Overall, I do not understand A) why people would complain they are destitute when they're the ones who opted to 2XP their way to 50, and B) why many of those same people beg for someone else to PL them when they could easily dual-box, get the inf AND the XP.

Then tie it back to hardware. This isn't rocket science.

Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but to be compliant with X, I shouldn't have to refer to Y when there's already something right in the client that tells me whether a server is lightly loaded, medium loaded, or overloaded. Just make those little icons translate to a number we all can relate to and voila, it's all in one place.

Do the Server Status 'glyphs' on the server selection screen correspond to a certain number of logged-in users? Any chance THAT could be updated so each 'star' or whatever represents, say, 300 users, and if a server is at 4 stars or less, multiboxing is allowed under ToS? Or some other number that is easy for the player to discern before just blowing past the server select screen and doing whatever they want?

I think the lack of available names is a good thing, it's a sign there are a ton of us logging in and doing all the stuff. Unfortunately (or, fortunately?) since all the straightforward names/concepts are taken, I have to resort to naming gimmicks, like adding formal titles (Mister, Captain, Doctor and so forth) or steering the character in question in the vein of a 1950s-era comic book "teen sidekick" which is how my Plant/Natural guy got named 'Lawn Boy.' Another way to go is make the character unusually large/small and make the name a play off of THAT, or choose a color theme and go that route a la the Brown Hornet. Sometimes I might throw an adjective in there, or make the character season/era-based, or, occasionally I'll use a single word that can be both a noun and a verb (not a gerund!). Like, my Rad/Rad defender is just called Draw, and that is still one of my favorite names for some reason. I sometimes choose names based just on how it would read when inserted in NPC dialog. I don't know why, but at the time I rolled it I thought having an NPC yell something like "Stop Something Else!" or whatever was funny, so I hung that on my TW/Bio. It does kind of bum me out when I think I have hit on a great name only to find out not only is THAT taken but someone has snapped up all the logical variants of it, but that just gives me a reason to come up with something that will bum someone ELSE out later on down the road.

Thanks for the replies; I usually play Controllers so all this inherent/damage cap stuff is a bit foreign to me. I hadn't thought about the impact Spiritual would have on PPM, but aside from ATOs and +Recovery I didn't rely too much on Procs on either dude. I figured, all things being equal, a power that deals 125 on a 20s timer does less damage per minute than one that does 100 on a 15s timer, but that doesn't factor in toggles or AoEs that would hit harder and so on and maybe obviate the need for a quicker attack cycle. That said, I had wanted to try Musculature to 'amp up' attuned enhancements from sets like Touch of Death.

So I have two nearly-identical Rad/Bio Brutes, the biggest difference between the two is their Alpha and where the ATOs are slotted. Anyway, on one of them, I notice he's consistently peaking in the 94-95 'Fury' range but has never approached 100. The other usually peaks around the 91-92. This is on a farm map where I can spend a good ten minutes solid killing hundreds of mobs without a break. What do people usually see out of Brutes, Fury-wise, and what does it take to hit 100? Another question, I was under the impression that your Fury level indicates how much of a damage boost you get, but they both start at +29% enhanced and get to around +215% (before Insps/buffs) just from facerolling, even though one has 4 or 5 less 'Fury' than the other. Is the damage boost tied to 'Fury' peak, or 'Fury' duration, i.e. if they are both in a long fight they would get about the same damage boost? Last question, the way I read it, Fury is kind of a way to reward you for scrapperlock. If that is the case, would I be better off with Alpha Spiritual (recharge) or Alpha Musculature (damage) Incarnates? I ask because the Brute with the consistently-higher Fury is using Spiritual and everything recharges about 25% faster than the Musculature dude, but I find myself using Taunt more often on him because Lt's and Bosses last a little bit longer than on the Musculature dude. Is there a, no-doubt about it, take THESE Incarnates approach for Brutes?

I don't know how long it takes a community to vote on raising a plaque to commemorate an event, let alone fund that plaque, have it created, arrange to have it installed, then have an inevitable dedication ceremony, but there is a plaque that talks about "Eochai was defeated here on October 31 2004" so we are easily well into 2005, if not closer to 2006 for all of that to have taken place. Given the state of vehicles/technology in-game, I would say this is what I would expect a pre-iPhone society to look like if it were constantly Ground Zero for alien invasions, intra-dimensional warfare, attempted occult kidnappings, organized crime operating openly in the streets, gangs terrorizing citizens every 80 yards or so... and having "heroes" swoop in firing beam rifles indescriminately, firing off Novae every 37 seconds, deploying Phantom Armies and Tar Patches all over the place... I mean, who would WANT to drive a newer car in that environment, let alone insure it?

I have a feeling the resulting spreadsheet would weigh about as much as the Sun. What would be cool is if HC found a way to, once or twice a year, unleash a redacted Character DB and let US burn ourselves out querying and analyzing it. I think it would be interesting to try and figure out what the "average build" is for a given power combination, or, see what the "average" slotting is for a given power, if they even keep that data in the CharacterDB.

I can't find any numbers on Traps; are its debuffs really that much better than /Dark? Because in my experience, Ill/Dark just melts AVs if the pilot knows what the buttons actually DO.

I love Grav/Kin - it was the first controller I took to 50 on Live - but it plays a little scarier than it looks in Mids. First off, your three main attacks are ST, so, no matter how much +Damage you get off Fulcrum Shift, you're still going to be cycling through single targets until they are dead. You can stuff some Procs in Crushing Field to speed things along, but for the most part you'll be firing Propel like a madman until you get your Incarnate Nuke. While the variety of objects you Propel will keep you from being bored of the visual, you'll learn to hate the noise. Secondly, your +Heal and +Recovery buffs require you to be either IN or NEAR melee if you want to actually benefit from them. Once there, your only damage mitigation is to do something else to agitate the mob - either reduce the strength of their attacks, trap yourself in a bubble with them, or fire them across the map with Wormhole. Which, by the way and thirdly, Grav/Kin literally lives and dies by ToHit. If any of your /Kin powers miss, it's an agonizing wait until they are ready for the next try. Nothing sucks more than Wormholing a mob into a stupor, eagerly firing off FShift or Transference and seeing a bunch of MISS! floating where your buffs should be. Then you're stuck there at a +25% damage bonus and no endurance while you race to Lift and Propel them to death one at a time before the Stun wears off. To mitigate, I highly recommend Tactics with a full set of Gaussian's. Overall, Grav/Kin is fun and I was sure to roll one on HC soon as I could, but having played them both deep into the 50s, I very much prefer Gravity/Time over Grav/Kin; the buffs and debuffs out of /Time aren't as spectacular as /Kin, but they are much more consistent and let you play from as safe a distance as you want. Case in point, I rarely ever need the Heal out of /Time, because I usually have the mob well in hand before they can do anything to me.

@The Philotic Knight: What app IS that, and where would one get it? And where could a lowly so-and-so get their hands on Powers.def? I happen to have a little experience in creating data-driven dashboards; if I could stuff that into a DB, there are a few things I would like to take a crack at.

This! I never realized how much I relied on Red Tomax's site on Live until I tried to get by without it on HC. While it is nice to have the web archive version, it is incomplete and outdated. What would be awesome would be an online/web-based planner that included look-ups for powerset quantification, so I wouldn't need to jog halfway across the internet to see that Shiver hits for -81.25 Recharge, or wonder what each of the Oil Slick Arrow pseudopets REALLY does, by the numbers.

I like keeping shards around so I can tinker with different Alphas(Alphii?) when I'm out running around. Besides, Threads/EmpMerits are just too precious to waste and Shards are right there, blinking at you. Oh, as for how to get a lot of shards/threads...

Dual-client is a pretty simple solution, I have to imagine a majority of PL-types do this to some extent(?)

Me, I dig going punchless /Energy. Build Up and Power Boost are nice, but the real prize here is Energize, which gives you a massive endurance discount, a large regeneration bonus, and a little shot of health. It's easy to perma- as well. My En/En floats around with a -60% endurance discount; I have 119 endurance recovering at 3.5/s, and consuming 0.38 endurance/s with Hover, Tough, Weave, Maneuvers and Sprint active. Even the Hasten crash doesn't drop me below 100 endurance, and that's while firing full throttle as it is happening. When I tap Boost, Energize hits me for a 333 heal, and I can do that every 31s.

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.