Shred Monkey

Short answer, I go where the teams are... and the teams are blue side. In this way, the areas with the greatest population attract the most people... creating a self-sustaining imbalance. Gold Side is even worse the Red Side for finding teams so that place is a ghost town. Ironically, if you just look at content, I think Gold Side > Red Side > Blue Side. But nothing is going to change the status quo.

Yeah.. I agree. I've done MsLTF and LRSF probably 200-300 times over the last few years. Exactly 0 times did I see anything but an "objectives only" run. I generally prefer to do kill-through runs for any TF, so its not that I'm choosing only speed runs. But for those two, a "speed run" really is assumed if the leader doesn't explicitly state differently. For anything else I wait for the leader to express their intent before going off.

It's not a scrapper answer, but the epic archtypes might give you the "had to think" element your friend is missing. The downside IMHO is how they try to force you into a pre-set RP concept.

Making the tier 2 slot consumes the tier 1 slot as part of the recipe. Making the tier 3 slot consumes the tier 2. Making a tier 4 slot consumes two tier 3 slots.

Here's the 2 things that, once I understood them, opened up my eyes to everything else. I'm intentionally leaving out information for simplification, but this will get you everything you need. I hope this helps you or anyone else who finds the interface confusing. #1 - All the recipes follow this pattern: #2 - These 4 options are where you go to create the salvage you're missing. For common salvage: 20 Threads For uncommon salvage: 60 Threads For rare salvage: 8 Empyrean Merits For very rare salvage: 30 Empyrean Merits Threads are random drops from level 50+ enemies, so just play the game killing things over level 50. To get Empyrean Merits, level up. You get 20 Emp merits every 3rd veteran level. The rewards decrease as you level up but you'll have everything built before that happens.

There.... that statement I agree with. I was taking your OP as meaning people are actively attempting to take over control of a team and that somehow getting the star means a success. 1) I don't believe that ever happens. And 2) I do not believe that obtaining the star means you have taken over leadership of a team.

Well, I stand by my original assessment that anyone who honestly believes "team stealing" is a thing is delusional. Because it's just not an actual thing.

My point is that YOU are wrong. That's not what is happening. They're increasing the level of the team. They haven't taken anything away from you. Besides... just say no if you don't want to do it. But you ARE wrong about their motives.

Actually, once you understand it, the incarnate system is actually pretty simple (ignore shards and shard-side components). The problem is that you'd never know it's simple from looking at the game interface.

I like term, myself, and use it frequently, if for no other reason but to indicate that I'm playing my blaster in a way that's going to make things die stupid fast. Imagine getting behind the wheel of a car, cracking your knuckles and saying "buckle up, everyone.. we're in for a ride." This means more than the words are actually saying. "Blapper" isn't a word... it's an attitude.

I have a target next button.. a target nearest button, a follow button, a target previous button (that is my least used one, but it's handy if you tab past that one you want). And I have this wonderful bind: /bind alt+PageDown beginchat /bind PageDown targetcustomnext enemy alive Note there is a space behind the end of that line that is important. What that bind does it it starts a command in chat of "/bind PageDown targetcustomnext enemy alive " and leaves your cursor 1 space after the alive so you can type a quick "Cyclops <enter>" and just that quickly you've created a keybind to target Cyclops.... Use that alt+<key> again type the new target and you've overwritten that bind with a new target. This makes for very quick updating of targets. I actually have 2 quick alt-key binds set up So I can swap to targeting, for example "Surg" without losing my bind for "Gen" in the 3rd ITF mission.

Maybe this is well known to Traps users... but I just started playing traps again since live and was here looking for tips. Here's a tip of my on regarding Shield Generator: /bind 7 powexec_location self Force Field Generator This will cast shield generator on top of you without requiring a mouse click. It makes it much quicker to re-summon.

It's funny how often this question gets asked. It's literally the first question when creating a new character... yet many of us never knew we were answering it.

Most people share that opinion, but that's beside the point. The point is that person asking for the star isn't "stealing the team" as the OP accused them of doing. The level's don't scale. If you're level 31 set at +0/1 and you start a manticore task force, you and everyone on your team will be level 31 (or 30 if they happen to be below 31).... But you'll be greeted at the door of the first mission by level 35s. They person asking for the star is correcting for this scenario. Also, if the TF is run at level 38, the team members above level 38 will have access to those level 38 powers. It's reasonable for a player to want their level 38 power even if it's not "needed." Some tanks, for example may use their level 38 power in their attack chain, and without it they do a lot of standing around waiting for a power to recharge. In that case, they may prefer to not run the TF at all if it's going to be run at 31 instead of 35. That's a very reasonable conversation to have before he task force and has nothing to do with "team stealing."

There's a tip mission where you have to talk to Maelstrom after you fight him. He's goes "hidden" so if you lose track of where you beat him you have to move around the room and just hope your mouse cursor hits him. I lose him sometimes even knowing ahead of time to pay attention to him and knowing exactly where he's supposed to be at.

My biggest pet peeve... I'm supposed to talk to an NPC before the end of the mission, they better be screaming bloody murder for me to come talk to them. Without some very overt clues, I'm probably going to clear the mission without noticing the person standing there quietly. Then when there's nobody to talk to in the last room,, I'll assume that the mission is broke and quit out.

Grats! This is one of, if not the most difficult, yet still possible achievement in the game, IMHO. LRSF being about equal. It's really so much more then just being able to survive a 1 on 1 fight against a big bag of hp. Well done!

In CoH combat there are 2 things that matter: 1. Removing enemy hitpoints 2. Protecting self & ally hitpoints Note that buffs, debuffs, and controlling enemy position with taunts and controls can contribute to role #1. Similarly, tanking, controls, buffs, debuffs, and heals contribute to role #2. Nearly any group of 8 players will succeed in these 2 things. In fact its more likely that you'll join a group of 8 players and find you're not contributing either of these 2 things because there's so much overlap of roles in a team of 8. At this point, you should ask yourself, "Do I care?" If you don't, then keep going, and have fun. If you do care and it bothers you a lot that you're not contributing then change something; join a different team, make a different toon, play exclusively at low-to-mid levels, respec to focus on a different aspect of your toon, solo or play on smaller teams. These are all great options. And *THAT* is what sets this game apart from other MMOs. The options to do what you want, be what you want, look the way you want, and play the way you want ...are endless.

And on that day... There shall be such a game... A game where all content is created equal. A game where people of all ATs and alignments seek out under-used content with the same desire, the same drive, the same unbridled fervor as they do their AE farms today. And on that glorious day, how wonderful a game this will be.

Yeah.. I see it all the time. Passing the star to initiate the TF so the players can be at the level cap for the TF is obviously the most intelligent thing to do. It's not team stealing. You're still the leader. Calling it team stealing and obnoxious makes you sound like you live in a paranoid delusion.

Team stealing? What color is the sky in your world?

I'm the same. I play my 50s enough that when I do have a new alt, I can generally just mail myself what I need from whatever 50 is the richest at the time. But I generally don't do anything intentional to earn influence. I have somewhere in the range of 300M-500M inf and probably 10,000+ unspent reward merits.

I agree with most everything you both are saying. But I'm also personally familiar with the publication process for academic journals. Double blind peer reviewed articles are still full of opinions, guesswork, and circular references. Professors earn points toward tenure based on publications and presentations, so they're motivated to push quantity over quality and unfortunately many shortcuts and exploits exist. It's pretty common to see circular logic where someone claims their findings support a "popular" theory, and then they cite articles that define that same "popular" theory to support their findings. Both articles gain credibility, but neither has really added new proof of anything. It's not a complete house of cards, But let's just say I'm a skeptic when it comes to things that don't have solid laboratory proof. I mean, in the end we've jumped from 5-6 fossilized bone fragments to super-hearing apex predators. I think it's valuable to take a step back and ask if we've assumed too much. Sidenote: Vaccines efficacy has been proven. Go get one, (because I'd hate for you to think I'm one of those anti-science bozos.)

Oh I have no doubt you can learn a lot from fossil records. But look at that image in the link. There's an awful lot of "penciled in" parts. How do we know the snout isn't 2x longer? Furthermore, I could, for example, look at a skull like that and say, "I've observed many dinosaur skull fragments from this era appear to be consistent with those found in head injuries in head-on collisions. Therefore we can determine that Dinosaurs didn't have seat-belt laws." I do believe that science can tell us things about dinosaurs, but they never tell us "We're 80% sure the parts we pieced together are from the same animal. We're 60% sure we put the pieces in the right place. We're 33% sure the parts we didn't find look like *this*, which produces an irregular bump in *this* spot that we're 20% sure improved hearing. Accounting for stacking margins of error, our prediction model has a 3.1% chance of being correct." Instead feels like "look at that bump! This dino had super hearing!"

Am I the only one who looks at those photos of how much of the skull they're basing these "discoveries" on and thinks it might be possible that Paleontology us just a specific sub-genre of SciFi literature?