EdgeOfDreams

Baseline SO slotting: 1 Accuracy (except auto-hit powers and toggles) 3 of whatever the power's primary purpose is (e.g. damage, control, healing, resist, etc.). More than 3 is pointless due to massive diminishing returns. 1 Endurance Cost Redux on each of your most costly powers 1 Recharge on most slow attacks 3 recharge on stuff like Aim, Build Up, and other long recharge buffs. For powers like Midnight Grasp that take a ton of different enhancements, you generally want to pick one effect to focus on and only slot the other stuff if you have extra slots. E.g. I would normally slot Midnight Grasp with 1 acc, 3 dam because it is really mainly a damage power. On the other hand, Life Drain is both damage and heal, so it might get 1 acc, 2 dam, 2 heal if I only have 5 slots for it. A sixth slot could be dam, heal, or rech depending on my needs. You can optimize further, but this baseline will get the job done 99% of the time. If you're gonna deviate from it, you should make sure you understand the mechanics well enough to justify the choice.

Put it this way: if you have a max Fury bar AND damage enhancements, you'll deal almost 4x base damage. If you have the max Fury bar and do NOT have damage enhancements, you'll only deal 3x base damage. There is no reason to give up on a quarter of your potential damage output.

I've got a Staff/Fire/Mu Brute that I enjoy farming with. Not the fastest farmer, of course, but good enough. I'm getting ready to invest in taking him from casual farmer to blinged out farmer, but I need to figure out what a good attack chain actually looks like. Any idea what I should be doing beyond spamming my biggest AoEs as they recharge?

IIRC they were supposed to be "Origin" power pools: Force of Will = Natural Sorcery = Magic Experimentation = Science Gadgets (not released yet) = Tech I forget if the Mutant one ever had a name. They have some fun uses on certain builds, but you're right that they aren't super popular. As far as I can tell, the big issue is that they don't offer an equivalent of Combat Jumping, Hasten, or Hover, which are three of the best and most popular pool powers. And if you're already taking one of those, you might as well take the Travel power from the same pool. Attacks, buffs, and debuffs from pool powers tend to be weak as well, so there isn't a ton of motivation to take those either.

For your first character, don't expect to have much money until you've leveled up a lot. Sell the things you find as drops according to this rough guide: Enhancements: vendor Salvage: vendor or Auction House Common and Uncommons, always Auction rares Recipes: vendor Common, Auction House Uncommon and Rare Merits: go to a Merit Vendor and spend them on Enhancement Boosters or Converters, then sell those on the Auction House Once you have a character who is slotted up with SOs or basic IOs and has a few million INF to spare, then you can start thinking about various ways of making money off of playing the market. Also, once you have a max level character, it's easy to earn enough INF from running missions or TFs and selling your drops to fund future characters.

If you're looking for something more advanced, and have money to burn, here are two useful guides that will tell you about specific IOs that will give you a lot of bang for your buck.

If you're just starting out: If the power needs Accuracy, put in 1 Accuracy enhancement. If the power deals Damage, put in 3 Damage enhancements. If the power does something else, put in up to 3 enhancements of whatever it is that power does (e.g. 3 Heal enhancements in a healing power, 3 Defense enhancements in a Defense power). (More than 3 of a kind starts getting hit HARD by diminishing returns.) If it's a toggle (except for a few very cheap ones like Combat Jumping) or it uses a lot of Endurance, put in 1 Endurance Cost Reduction enhancement. If it has a very long recharge time, put 1 or more Recharge Reduction enhancements. Stamina needs 2 or 3 Endurance Modification enhancements. Those are the absolute basics that will be good enough to get you going. You can just do that with purchased enhancements from vendors up until around level 22. Then you can switch over to crafting basic Invention enhancements instead (the ones that just give straight Accuracy, Damage, whatever by itself). You can ignore Invention Sets until you're more familiar with the game and still do fine.

Personally, I think Gravity is much better suited to Controllers than Dominators. Compared to most other control sets, Gravity has fewer control/debuff powers in exchange for Lift and Propel, two direct damage powers. On a Controller, those get boosted by Containment, so they add substantially to your single-target DPS. On a Dominator, Lift and Propel don't benefit from Domination, and you've already got plenty of direct attacks in your secondary. That said, if you want to play a primarily ranged Dominator, Grav/Martial does makes thematic sense. You can take all the shuriken powers, plus Propel, and be a master of projectiles.

I tried this on my Dark/Savage Dom today. With the Recharge bonus from my Base and paying for Offense Amplifier, I got perma-dom at level 25. The key bonuses are... * LOTG in Stealth, Grant Invis, Manuevers, and Combat Jumping * 4-slot Basilisk's Gaze in my ST hold * 5-slot Dominator ATOs in the AoE stun * 4-slot Cloud Senses in the fear cone * 5-slot Positron's Blast in Unkindness * 4-slot Call to Arms in Haunt That adds up to 65% Recharge, +20% from base, +15% from offense amplifier, for a total of +100% global recharge. Obviously, this is a bit more expensive way to go, but it will hold me over until I level into the 30s and can replace Offense Amplifier with a couple more set bonuses.

Here's one weird idea: is there any way to make badges that depend on having a certain team composition? For example, imagine a series of badges that require you to complete existing task forces or trials with a team of all one AT, or a team with no characters above a certain level, or a team of only four players, etc.

The main problem I see with trying to create a harder mode is that the way you beat most existing challenges in CoH is already very simple. Either you have enough mitigation + enough damage output to win, or you don't. There are very few challenges that can't be beaten by giving your character bigger numbers. The exceptions are mostly Incarnate Trials, a few other trials and TFs, and the requirements for certain badges. So, if "hard mode" will mostly consist of spawning more enemies or giving enemies better stats, I don't think anyone will really find it interesting or satisfying. Instead, I'd like to see more new content that includes complex challenges or more badges added to existing content with requirements that force you to get creative to earn them.

No, you're stuck with the first power in your secondary power set, even when you respec. Generally, if that power isn't worth using, people will simply not put any slots into it or use it as a set bonus mule.

Yep, it's a PBAoE. It will grab multiple foes around you and pull them into melee range. You can't control which ones are grabbed though - it prefers the closest ones. And you can't control where they end up. So it's great if you want to cluster up enemies for an AoE or take a bunch of aggro, but you have to be careful how you use it.

I've been having fun with Staff/Fire/Mu. It's not top tier, but it gets the job done. Only problem is that I have no clue what the attack chain should be. Any advice?

I'm 90% sure that Vigilance is NOT being applied when you look at it in the in-game character creation process. What's confusing you is the stuff siolfir pointed out. You're comparing the powers at level 1, which is not a valid comparison. Compare the powers with the slider pulled over to 50 instead.

Actual in-game numbers for Ice Bolt at level 50: Blaster: 62.56 Corruptor: 41.71 Defender: 36.15 With 100% damage slotting and giving Defender the additional +30% from Vigilance while solo, those become: Blaster: 125.12 (plus more from Defiance) Corruptor: 83.42 (plus Scourge) Defender: 83.15 That lines up better with my own experience. Defender versus Corruptor is a toss-up when soloing, or maybe slightly in favor of the Defender on the sets with the best buffs/debuffs (e.g. Sonic Blast), but Corruptor damage is definitely better on teams and when Scourge procs against heavy targets.

It's gotta be something like this. Also, I just downloaded and installed the latest version of Mids Reborn. It appears to be showing the same damage for Defenders and BLASTERS. I know that's not right.

No. You have to go download a different version of the game code from whatever launcher or other source.

Hold up, something fishy is going on here. Defender Ranged Damage scale is 0.65. Corruptor Ranged Damage scale is 0.75. Unless Homecoming messed with something, there's simply no way a Defender's raw, unbuffed damage should be higher than a Corruptor's raw, unbuffed damage.

Once you're level 40 and have 20 inspiration slots, I'd say it's better to keep the small ones turned on. With the inspiration combining macros, you can quickly turn trios of small ones into reds and chew them up to maintain higher damage output. If you've disabled awaken and breakfree inspirations (and haven't turned on Team and Dual insps), then there are only 15 non-red inspiration types, of which 5 are the rare Large ones. With an inventory size of 20, it's very rare to end up with a completely full inventory and NOT have a 3-of-a-kind you can merge into more red.

I want "Monstrous Legs" with pants. Currently, there is no way to get certain kinds of monster or animal feet without the character's entire upper legs and crotch being 'naked' except for fur. I want to make a werewolf with pants, damnit. EDIT: Waitaminute, I might have just missed the option to do this. If I'm derping here, just ignore me.

So, after playing with it some more, I figured out that the 'skin' color on the 'Animal Fur' texture does change depending on what colors you choose, but it tends toward light skin, especially if you choose a shade of white/grey/black as your base tone. Note that in both of these screenshots, the "Skin" palette color is set to BLACK, yet it has no effect on the costume parts. Here's an example of a 'leopard' style that I've gotten to look decent, but look closely at the elbows, knees, and abs where there is "skin" showing. Ok, now look how he appears if I change his colors to black and white for a "snow leopard". Again, look at the elbows, knees, and abs:

Thanks for trying to help, but you misunderstood me. I know about the skin color palette. What I meant is that if you set the Chest or Legs texture to "Animal Fur", part of the texture always shows a caucasian skin tone even when you choose a different skin color in the skin palette. Try it for yourself and see.

Don't need a whole costume design, just advice, but this seemed like a good place to ask: For an anthro cat or wolf character, how do you make their chest, legs, and feet look good? Head and tail are easy, monstrous gloves with animal fur works for the hands, but I always get lost trying to choose a shirt, pants, and shoes for them. I'd like to show as much fur as possible, but the pure "Animal Fur" chest and leg options show too much human skin. What's even worse is that you can't change the skin color - it's always caucasian skin. So, what do you do? What costume parts for chest, legs, and feet work well with a "natural" anthro cat or wolf concept?

Well, yeah, I have a Fire Farmer, so the money is mostly a non-issue. Thanks for the other suggestions on temp powers that can't be bought, though. Thanks for the sanity check. Good to know that's it feasible. The next question is just how many temp powers and inspirations I actually need for a given build, but I can probably feel that out through experience.