Kigo

This thread pulls me both ways. On the one hand I have personally experienced a time on my fire/kin troller when some random blaster told team chat several disparaging things about my play including a point blank "This was the worst controller ever!" before he left. Nevermind that we had no tank and I was clearing half the map all by myself while the entire rest of the team worked on the other half, all he cared about was that he was dying because I was not there to hand hold him and keep him alive when he invariably gained aggro since he had built a glass canon with huge aggro control issues. But both the team leader and myself agreed that it would be a complete waste of time and my powerset to have me staying with the group like that. We were finishing maps in half the time by my doing that, but he cursed me out just because I was not there to babysit him. On the other hand I have also personally experienced times when a specific teammate would repeatedly knockback entire groups of enemies out of my AoE attacks making me waste my cooldowns. I'm fine with people having KB powers (although in this age with multiple sets that change kb to kd it does annoy me) but if you are going to have a power like that which can interfere with teammate's powers can you at least delay using it until after their own cooldowns are all tossed out? -_-

I think it was partly the character choice you made. When I first came back to City my very first character made was a pain/psi defender. And I leveled through AP just like you did but without capping my xp. Missions were long and tough. Yes, I could self-heal. But the damage I could do was barely visible even against minions and bosses or large groups would wreck me. And do not even get me started on the first time I tried soloing a boss despite the game's suggestion to bring a group - I won in the end but only because the boss when it killed me didn't regen faster than I could get back to him and he slowly wore down because I was persistent. Now, mind you I did not cap at 5 so I can never quite know whether I would have gotten the same issues, but it certainly seems to me that logically character choice matters for soloing. Overall I like the concept of clearing every single zone out this way if you can do it... but I feel like the powers of incarnates are just too important to delay for weeks or months doing the slow zone progression. Still, a concept worth having at least one alt to use just for when you want a different City experience.

Okay, so anyone who has looked into things will know that soft capping defense is a Good Thing. And that Smashing and Lethal damage is quite prevalent so if you can only soft cap one thing that might be a Good Thing to target unless you are fire farming in which case you would want that soft capped instead. And that melee/ranged/aoe pretty much covers every single possible attack you will face with a few exceptions so soft capping all 3 is a very Good Thing. The question then comes into play for the characters that are not primary defensive builds and can only get a single soft cap. I'll give an example of two builds I keep switching between on my pain/psi defender. Build 1 is an all-rounder defensive build with a focus on ranged defenses (since fly is a thing). S/L at 30.2, F/C at 29.9, E/N at 35.5, Psi at 27.4, M/R/A at 33/43.6/32.4 - this build seems to work "decent" enough but non-ranged 30s defenses means that when an attack is not tagged with ranged it lands more often than I would like. The character is a healer type so any damage that gets through is a trifle thing to worry about. However, the big problem is the mez attacks since the protections are all at 0 so if even a single mez attack gets through it is all over. And I hate being mezzed since often just as it happens a teammate needs a heal and I am unable to do so. The mezzes do not last long due to strong status resistances but... duration is a whole different story than the original proc of the mez. Getting constantly mezzed gets old fast. Build 2 basically traded defense of ranged for S/L with slightly better energy but far worse everything else especially psi and ranged. S/L at 45.8 F/C at 24.4. E at 40.8. N at 25. P at 19.4. M/R/A at 25/30.6/29.4 - it works amazing against anything that is even somewhat tagged with smashing or lethal, but absolute tissue paper if not tagged with either. I hoped this would be my solution to the mez by blocking off all attacks, but it feels like I get mezzed just as often. Both builds have their pros and cons. Ideally I would prefer not to compromise but sadly it must be one or the other. I honestly can not decide which of the two builds would be better for my defender, which in turn means I am undecided when it comes to building any other character. Thoughts from the community on which build is better if you must pick one build over the other? I tend to lean on build 2 because intellectually I know how many attacks are tagged with S/L while just having ranged as a defense leaves several Achilles heels. But I honestly feel like I am getting mezzed just as often with that build which was the whole point of the build change. And I am losing out on some important things by swapping in Mace Mastery for Dark Mastery. Mainly I really notice the loss of Dark Consumption for end returns and the self-rez. But unfortunately can't have both those two powers and the Scorpion Shield. 😕

Leadership toggles are actually one of the most desired things to bring to a group. Partly because they make a slight difference for you, but mostly because they make a huge difference for the group as a whole and they stack. Meaning that if say 5 people in the group all have the toggles then the group gets 5x the results without suffering from personal enhancement caps. That makes a huge difference. Now as for how to avoid end drain... three options. 1) Some Incarnate choices will cause a permanent change to your End Drain and instantly make the toggle drain almost unnoticeable, while other choices while active will give you so much recovery you don't even notice the drain. 2) Run an IO set that both helps the drain and also gives good set bonuses as well. For example the +ToHit set Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control when 6 stacked gives personal dmg buff and defenses. 3) Just stick on 1-2 lvl 50 Endurance Reduction enhs to each one. This instantly drops the drain by half.

Seeing this thread shows me simply that so many of you just do not understand WHY NCSoft shut down CoH. Let me explain things to those of you who fail to understand the logic behind the decision. Before I begin, let me say I am as avid about the game as most of you and was so happy it was brought back and sad to see it go. But all of us only look at things from the mindset of a player. We loved CoH and it felt like a betrayal in some ways to yank it out from under us. But the decision had nothing to do with aion or GW2 or Lineage 2 or any other game NCSoft was supporting at the time. It had nothing to do with future games they were planning on producing. It also, believe it or not, had almost nothing to do with the player numbers and how much money they were making profit wise. Rather it all comes down to one issue. Both Marvel and DC were constantly filing new legal at NCSoft en masse. Dozens of claims were being made and NCSoft had to defend against each one of them. Now most of them were completely baseless and the judges would eventually toss them out or at least deny sub claims. But the lawyers for the two big comic companies were throwing so much manure at the walls that some of it stuck, and even the stuff that didn't still had to be cleaned away by NCSoft's janitorial staff (ie their house or retainer lawyers). That alone was bad, but what was worse was that some of the filings were actually not being thrown out by judges. In particular I remember seeing one legal transcription that showed NCSoft was facing some pretty hefty fines for trademark infringement. And whether the DC/Marvel law teams won or lost one particular motion or suit the onslaught did not stop. New filings were being made almost like clockwork. One particularly nasty suit that posed some nasty fines if it succeeded was being debated in the judges chambers the very day before the press release came out about the servers going to be shut down. A judgement was not made because the shutdown was announced and the law team for the other party backed off in a surprising twist (unless a backroom deal was made regarding the shutdown). We may never know exactly how the situation would have ended without the shutdown, but someone up in NCSoft corporate offices saw the potential risk of fines as being too much of a risk. And the shutdown came to be. People in this thread and in game talk about NCSoft making mistakes and missing out on millions, but the truth is that on risk/cost versus reward basis they probably took the only path they could. I still did not like losing a favored game, but at least intellectually I can understand why it probably happened.

It is still happening for me. I am using the Indomitable server and currently only have 2 chars. No other servers used so far so there can't be anything slowing it down on my end. Win7 and the wait time for the character list after log off of one is approximately 55-70 seconds every single time despite having tons of available ram, cpu resources, and a 1080 gpu.