Shred Monkey

In truth, the biggest boost from Incarnates comes from the first slot. It gives you a +1 level and, assuming you take damage (which you probably should) it adds a full enhancement worth of damage to your attacks beyond the ED cap. If you're fighting level 54s, the difference between a level 50 hitting using an attack with no incarnate and a level 50+1 with tier 4 muscular using the same attack is quite significant. With only a few exceptions, the other incarnate stuff kind of fluff because it is either: 1) situational use only 2) too small to matter, or 3) complete overkill of something you didn't really need.

Don't discount the pill routine so quickly. I may not have the body or the energy of my 25 year old self. But the one advantage I have now is a much stronger financial position. If there's something I can buy to help me stay fit and healthy, or motivate me to do what it takes to stay fit and healthy, that's money I'm willing to spend.

I feel like I'm at least a year older now then I was when I first read this thread.

I went through this exercise, except I used level 20. I froze XP there after going through a complete run of all Gold Side missions and ran as much content as I could at level 20. I settled on a katana/willpower brute. It relies mainly on Devine Avalanche stacking for survivability from soft-capped melee and lethal damage (most attacks at low levels are melee or guns). Plus it has excellent regen and endurance. Willpower gets decent auto powers at low levels, so that helps give added value for no endurance cost. Katana has a decent low level attack chain and as a brute, I can ramp up fury for damage output without devoting any enhancements to damage. Just pulled up my build and checked. This would be just fine at 15 as well. I give up quick recovery, Lotus Drops or Rise to the challenge. All powers I benefit from, but don't need. Slotting on all the powers I have left would be identical as well since my level 17 and 19 slots are all in those 3 powers. I would need to stop and rest every few fights. But there would be very few single enemy stoppers in the game at that level.

I could absolutely get behind new animations for powersets to use weapons. Whether it's sci-fi guns, or magic wands/staffs, or even just the option to make things come from other areas of the body (just because psi stuff affects enemy minds doesn't mean it has come from my forehead with my hands at my temples.) It would be a really nice addition to the game.

Hovering with seismic would completely neuter an otherwise quite powerful set. All the boosts and bonuses require you to be on the ground to use them.

In my experience, giving my keyboard a good shake while tapping hard on the shift keys and control keys fix many problems like this.

I don't know the name of it, but that Vigilante to Villian tip missions where you go into Orenbega and hunt down a demon. No spoilers, but the text of that story when taken in the context of you becoming evil gives me shivers. One Good Spider popped in my mind right away as well.

I'm going to walk you through how to use the build below so you can get the most out of it and expand on it in the future. First, the attack chain. You have more attack powers then needed. Let's strip the extra ones out (where possible). In the build below I've put enough recharge in each power to run this chain: Air Superiority > Shadow Maul > Air Superiority > Assassins Eclipse > Siphon Life > ---Repeat--- Use Touch of fear and Placate as you enter a fight to put 2 enemies "on hold" then target to the most dangerous target and begin the knockdown/beatdown of that target until it's dead. Air Superiority will be recharged fast enough to perm-knockdown a target. You swap targets as needed to always have 1 feared (and another placated when it's up) while you beat down your most dangerous enemy. This method should work very well on missions sized for 1 or 2 players since you'll normally be able to apply soft controls on everything you're fighting. Use Dark Regen to heal as needed. I've taken Dark Embrace and Murky Cloud in the build below. But I honestly wouldn't even bother turning them on for most fights. Your main source of survivability is going to be your control powers and your heals. Once you get into the 30s and can slot the resistance powers better and it'll be worth using them. Make sure obsidian shield is always running, however, as that's your status protection. Here's the build: I recommend using level 25 IOs as they're equivalent to SOs and don't lose their effectiveness as you go. I put in some IOs in health and stamina. These will help with endurance, and they're worth the trouble of earning the merits/influence to buy. Also the -knockback IO I have in evasive Maneuvers will prevent those knocks you were complaining about.

If it's the one-good-spider alignment mission... if you take your time leading the defector out, you get to fight a lot more then 3 named badguys. I've never counted the ambushes, but I'd estimate it's 5+ spawns of more baddies with a named enemy in each. If you ramp up the difficulty, this mission is a good test of a full built level 50. Since the ambushes are on a timer, this is the rare instance where you need a balance of high damage and survivability to clear the ambushes before you get overwhelmed.

As I recall, originally the game stopped at 40 and Numina's was the final Task Force of the game. The hunt portion had some significance in that you were revisiting all the zones and enemy groups in the game that had taken you a several weeks of sweat and tears to work through now culminating in this ultimate encounter deep within the most wild and dangerous zone in the game. Today it's a meaningless mind numbing exercise like trying to speed run a grocery store with 8 friends. Welcome to the results of Power Creep.

I'm going to say something controversial, but I know what I'm talking about here. I highly recommend you take time to really consider it. Farming and instant 50s isn't the answer to being bored with content. It's quite the opposite. Farming, in fact, is the reason you're bored with content. You're too used to getting exp quickly so everything else seems slow and boring. If you're not gaining XP at the rate you're accustomed to, it means you're not getting your dopamine hits fast enough and you're unsatisfied. If you give up farming forever, maybe even take a break from the game to reset your expectations. Or try what I did, and roll up a level 20 and freeze XP for a while to just play the hell out of a level 20 toon, exhausting all the content you can for a good week or two. Maybe skip all the P2W stuff and travel powers. Hide your mini-map. Really experience the game with no shortcuts. You'll might just find yourself enjoying content again. I know lots of people say, "OH, i've been through contact missions so many times I don't want to do it again. But be honest, have you really been through all of it? Redside? Goldside? How many times have you done all the Striga missions? Croatoa Missions? Have you ever seen the level 20 Rogue to Hero tip mission where you wear a Statesman costume? I'm not here to tell you how to play. But if you find yourself wishing you could fall in love with this game again, I highly suggest you try abstaining from farming for a while. Wait until it gets out of your system, and see what happens.

I've been using as my standard blaster build to aim for soft cap smashing/lethal and ranged (usually getting 45% to energy as well). With the upcoming changes my survivability will go down as many attacks that are AoE or Melee will now be unaffected by my S/L defense and get through easier. I'm curious on everyone's thoughts about the upcoming changes and what they'll do, if anything, to their builds. Personally, my main blaster these days is seismic/martial blaster. I created a build that ignores range defense and focuses on typed defenses (achieved soft cap to all but negative). I was also able to swap in some procs to my ST attacks so my ST damage goes up with this build as well. It's working well and with the added ST damage I'd to keep it even if I27 wasn't coming. I'm a little weaker to a few enemies that have ranged psi damage but I'm still handling them with my knockdowns, barrier destiny, and raw damage.

For endgame yes. Tough is the only place for most blaster builds to slot the two +3 defense unique enhancements. That alone makes this pool mandatory for a min/max blaster build. Weave gives a good amount of defense and another place for LotG +7.5% recharge. And if you have slots and need, Boxing can be a set mule for Kinetic Combat or Mako's Bite to get more defense. For leveling up, I'd focus on getting attacks slotted first.

Honestly, it is true that you might feel worthless. However, that's not only a result of your build. What I mean is, if you have the greatest build of all time, you still might feel worthless in CoH because a strong endgame team kills so fast you're only throwing out 3-4 attacks per spawn and maybe 2 cycles of your attack chain on an AV and that's only if you're really aggressive. A speed ITF run of 12ish minutes goes so fast there's no way every player actually participates in every objective. At best they're leap-frogging each other or splitting up on objectives. I know personally I feel like sometimes I just can't run through caves fast enough to keep up. I think a more important question is how much is it going to bother you when it happens? If it bothers you a lot, then put more time in your build and then probably play on smaller teams and/or higher difficulty. Some people just skip endgame and play mid-level content because they find that more fun. It's really up to you. One of the great things about this game is that you do have the option of playing this game however you want. You'll still find teams who welcome you. Personally I wouldn't have a clue if my team members are playing toons without full enhancements. I don't really pay attention to them in that way. I do recommend including a way to stealth to mission objectives in your build. If you find yourself on a team where you're the only one who can't skip to the end of a mission, it is likely you'll get left out of a end boss fight at some point.

This is pretty much the same as my opinion. I take Infiltration as a default and only use others if there's a combat reason for it. However, just to be clear, I also have girth-o-plenty. Regarding Super Jump. The thing I don't like about it now is that it's got no ups. I go plenty high, but the speed is off. I go forward so much faster then I go up it's weird.

Ok so I saw it this weekend. I went in expecting a Taika Waititi movie and came out feeling like I just watched a 2 hour GnR music video. Seriously, not just Sweet Child of Mine, but also Welcome to the Jungle, and Paradise City plus many references in background and dialog. GnR was practically a character in the movie (I was looking for slash to be an extra after a while, but didn't see him if he was there). Generally I enjoyed the movie from a shallow "lets just have fun" perspective. But I won't try to defend it as an amazing movie experience. I watched it with my 16 year old son and we had a good time.

Combat teleport causes a weapon redraw for weapons that don't have a "no draw" option. I'm not sure why we still have weapons with no-draw options, but it really defeats the purpose of combat teleport if I have a delay in attacking after a teleport. I'd be quicker to just run there. My experience with this issue is on my night widow. Not sure if other or all sets have the same problem.

As many mentioned this change hurts resist based characters a lot more than defense based characters (for endgame builds specifically). I don't disagree with the change in principle. But I think that an additional change be implemented to re-center the balance. I suggest changing defense debuffs. Defense based toons have a HUGE advantage there. It's almost a binary (I'm OK vs I'm NOT OK) when facing certain enemies when you have no defense dubuff resistances and you're the center of agro. I think it should be more like "I'm OK vs I need to be careful." My Suggestion is to make Defense Debuffs not stack, or cap if that's more doable. Personally I think a target max at around 10-15% is about right. This would be 3-4 times more incoming damage if you're at 45% defense. That's still dangerous, but it's not 19.5 times more incoming damage, which is quite possible now. There may be other/better ways to look at this logically, but I think now is a good time to look at it.

I've killed the flyer in Grandville. It's invulnerable while it's moving, but it makes several stops. You damage it in those stopped locations. It's been a few years, but as I recall, the best strategy is to wait for it to move and then attack at the beginning of a stop to get the longest attack window possible.

I really try not to rely on ageless because destiny has so many other good options... my Shield/MA tank does use ageless, though. I do have to plan for something to help with energy, though... body epic is common in my builds, or powersets that have some kind of energy management. My energy/energy handles it easily. My Nightwidow had the hardest time, but also has the best use of procs I've seen. For him, I managed by working out what toggles I really didn't need and doing a lot of +recovery franken-slotting. For example I replaced one of the acc/dam Hami'Os with a acc/dam gladiator's strike to pair with the gladiator's strike proc for 2.5% recovery each. Yeah.. this is correct, while I do a lot of planning for my leveling-up builds, I don't generally worry about procs until my final build.

Other games have been about getting single pulls and splitting/controlling enemy groups, but CoH has always been about fighting full spawns all at once. I really enjoy the gameplay style you're talking about in those other games, but in CoH, that would be a ridiculously slow way to progress.

Killing scrapyarders in Sharkshead Isle will trigger a miner's strike with the Ghost of Scrapyard. No cooldown or other requirement, so you can cycle this very quickly.

Quick disclaimer, I'm pretty hardcore on this subject, so I'm sure many disagree with some of what I'm about to say, but here's my 2-cents. So when I proc out a power, I slot for accuracy, damage, and procs, with a little endurance reduction. A typical proc'd out attack might be 2 level 53 acc/dam HamiOs, 1 llevel 53 dam/end D-sync, and 3 damage procs. This will always do more damage then not proc'ing out the power because, well, it's fully slotted for damage AND has 3 procs. The longer the base recharge, the more likely you are to get a proc, but even short recharge powers do put out more damage when they're slotted this way. The times I don't use this are: 1. When I need to slot for a set bonus, such as ranged defense. 2. When I need to slot for recharge to get a full attack chain and I can't get enough global recharge to cover the requirement (honestly, this is rare because I will move on to a different powerset if this happens to to many attack powers). 3. Brutes... I don't play them much, but honestly those extra damage enhancements don't do much. I might go with a 4th proc, or just 5 slot a power if the build is tight. 4. When there just aren't 3 damage procs available. Ranged attacks often have this problem.

I'm sure this is a massive undertaking to fix unless someone comes up with a way to automate it, but I think root cause is the maps themselves. They have places with geometry problems. Places where a body fits into, if you land on it in just the right orientation and speed, but can't get out because there's no way to reorient yourself perfectly to get back out. They need to do some rework of the maps to make the collision surfaces all smooth. Go ahead and leave the visual textures that we all see the same, but remove the collision mechanics from them and add invisible surfaces over/under them all that are flat or rounded smoothly so there's nothing to get stuck on. Also turn off the collision with CoT map torches while you're at it.