Impact

You're right, John, I was overlooking something. I missed one of the 35/40 badges and didn't see it until I went back through the list a third time today. Accolade popped the moment I completed it.

I have this exact problem myself. I have inventor, master craftsman, and all the memorization badges (including the 45-50's), but accolade won't pop for me. Ideas?

This is at least the third or fourth time additional auto-cast powers have been independently suggested, including once by myself. I love the idea, and I hope it's on the dev's radar. My suggestion was level-gate one or two more auto-casts, but the OP's ideas are also good ones.

I've suggested giving players one or two additional level-gated auto-fire powers several times. That would be a great QoL improvement for many builds.

I would recommend The Origin of Power instead, here. 5 missions: talk to person ×4 (should be 5, but I haven't seen the fifth), door mission with ten glowies and boss room. It's listed under 45-50 but awards 25-29 badges. For 30-34 you can easily do "The Aura of Power" found in the Level 50 Flashbacks. It's the Level 30 mission arc that originally unlocked the auras for your character. Talk to Professor Smythe (City Hall, where also the quest giver is, so you can use the flashback crystal to port there) Defeat 15 Freakshow, Defeat 15 Rikti, Defeat 15 Devouring Earth, back to Atlas City Hall, Done. (all enemies can be found in Crey's Folly at Level 30+, your hero remains Level 50 during the Flashback). For Level 50, just do the Dark Astoria prologue story, no fighting, just some talking and running around in PI and DA. These are great recommendations. I wish there was something similar to replace Division: Line in the 40-49 range.

Agreed. It's simple and it's worked on live for years. No need for complicated changes which change the set's identity. And agreed again. Rage isn't part of Rad Melee, or Titan Weapons, or Spines, or some other high end melee set. If it was, then calling for nerfs to its power would be justified. But Rage is part of Super Strength, a set that's of average or less power when taken as a whole with Rage as it was. The nerf was totally unnecessary and has wrecked some builds completely while damaging others that weren't that strong to begin with. The few players who talk repeatedly about Rage being overpowered generally cherry picked a couple SS powers for an AOE AE farming build without using the set as a whole. Jab, Punch, Hand Clap, Haymaker, and Hurl (5 of the 7 attacks!) are all skipped by min/maxing farmers in favor of far superior Power Pool attacks, a sorry state of affairs. Super Strength's only good abilities are Rage (stellar, the best of its kind), Foot Stomp (also great), and Knockout Blow (good but not outstanding). The rest are easily dispensed with. Taken as a whole and used by a non AE farmer, the set performs at a middling level. If Rage only applied to Super Strength and not to Power Pools (an interesting thought, but probably not feasible to implement), no farmer would take the set since Rage and Foot Stomp are the only reasons they make it their "primary" powerset to begin with.

I wish I had known this before I attuned 2 purple sets! I just tried boosting them, and that doesn't work. If I want them boosted, I'll have to recreate them. What a pain. But thanks for the helpful guide.

That's what I thought. I have a Beam/Time blaster I'm waiting to level up until the beta testing on snipes is resolved, one way or the other. Then I'll know if I need to squeeze Tactics into my build or not for insta-snipe.

Wait, the snipe changes are live already? I thought they were just on the test server.

Powers that blocked each other because of exact reset timers could be resolved by either player intervention or a random number generator. As for your cheating comment, I can't see any way that would happen.

I left the game around that time for this very reason. Nerfs were flying fast and furious in the interests of PvP balance, which I cared nothing for, and they were ruining the PvE experience, which I loved. Sets and incarnate powers have enabled some of my favorite builds to feel strong again, so I've returned, but yeah, those nerfs were terrible and the motivation for them a bad one. What should have been done was a PvP-only nerf, but that apparently required too many resources for the CoH dev team to pull off.

For this game's entire duration, we've been limited to having one power on automatic recast. Whether it's brawl as a newbie, a fast attack later, perma-hasten, Active Defense from the SD set, or whatever, one is it. I think that's too low, personally. How about allowing for two or three such autocasts instead? Raising the number could be level-gated, or require an accolade, or just be free, but I think it would be a good QoL improvement for some sets and builds.

I totally forgot you can run the old TFs in Ouro! How do you do this? I've run a lot of Ouro missions, but I have never seen the old TF's. I must be missing something. The TFs are listed as if they were story arcs. Most people never knew the actual names of the TFs, since they were almost universally referred to by the contact that starts them. So the original Positron Task Force is listed as "The New Recruits" under the Ouroboros Level 1-14 tier. You probably never noticed that it was there. I confess that I didn't recognize it as "Old Posi" at first either. ;) Wow, that's hilarious. I've actually done that arc and was surprised by its length, but didn't realize what it was. Lol at me.

I totally forgot you can run the old TFs in Ouro! How do you do this? I've run a lot of Ouro missions, but I have never seen the old TF's. I must be missing something.

Exactly right. The only reason I play Super Strength is because of love for the concept, not the actual powers as implemented. I've maxed it out multiple times as both a tanker and a brute, and I know its strengths and weaknesses. With perma-rage running, SS is just ok. Not terrible, but definitely not great either. And if you were to replace Rage with Build Up, SS would become the worst of the melee sets by a large margin. As Justice Eagle said, Rage is not a stand-alone ability. It's the cornerstone of Super Strength, the power the rest of the set is balanced around.

Maybe, maybe not. I saw a couple players say that their max budget Rad/Fire significantly outperformed their max budget SS/Fire. Again, I don't have the personal experience to judge.

Though I've barely started mine, I've seen many recent posts in various places saying Rad/Fire is the most effective AOE farming build of them all. YMMV, etc., have no personal experience to confirm it.

Yeah, it's a VERY weird discussion. When people on Reddit, these forums, or in help chat ask for the strongest melee builds, do the responses contain Super Strength? Not at all. Spines/Fire, Electric/Shield, whatever/whatever--but not SS. Where are the nerf calls for the sets that create the most effective melee builds in the game? But instead of looking at the over-performers, a number of posters in this thread want to take an already mediocre set and make it weaker. That depends on which AT the powersets take. Without a doubt that Spine/Fire is a Brute favored (farm-)set, while Electric/Shield gives Scrappers the most benefit in terms of burst. Regardless of AT, no one is pushing SS/anything or anything/SS as the best, most overpowered, FoTM melee set. If nerfs have to happen, target the top performers, not the middle or bottom of the pack. Or (my preference), leave the top performers alone and buff the sets that are lagging, which includes SS. Reverting the Rage change like the OP suggested would be a start.

Yeah, it's a VERY weird discussion. When people on Reddit, these forums, or in help chat ask for the strongest melee builds, do the responses contain Super Strength? Not at all. Spines/Fire, Electric/Shield, whatever/whatever--but not SS. Where are the nerf calls for the sets that create the most effective melee builds in the game? But instead of looking at the over-performers, a number of posters in this thread want to take an already mediocre set and make it weaker.

No need. You're just overthinking it. Reread what I posted and you might understand :) You seriously think making the two weakest powers in the set a little stronger is enough to compensate for losing perma-Build Up? It would not need significant changes. It would need 1 power change and an animation change. Granted some may call that significant but probably not as much work as people think. Drop Jab, replace it with 12 second recharge 95 damage (brute) attack. Speed up animation on punch to be like Energy punch. That would put it on par with other s/l sets out there and above IMHO due to footstomp being awesome. Hardly sufficient. You propose removing the strongest power in the set and replacing it with a generic variant. And to compensate, you advocate improving the two weakest. That's nowhere near enough. As is, with perma-Rage running, SS is middling at best. Why make it worse? If it's because you're jealous of Rage being the best Build Up power out there (which it is), that compensates for the set's other glaring weaknesses enough to make it tolerable as a whole.

This, exactly. The downside of Rage is that it's part of Super Strength, which would be by far the weakest of all melee sets without it running non-stop. With it, SS is on the weak side of middling at best. Those who argue in favor of turning Rage into Build Up should also argue in favor of massive buffs to the rest of SS's powers. It cannot be examined in isolation. I already did, several times :) Increase the base damage of Punch and Jab. The damage from Haymaker, Knockout Blow, and Haymaker is already decent, though I wouldn't turn away buffs for them too. Change to Build Up and all of the problems mentioned in this thread about Rage go away forever. The Super Strength power set has serious problems, and boosting its two least-damaging powers (Punch and Jab) would not be nearly enough to compensate for the loss of its strongest, Rage. SS doesn't excel at anything, really. With just one AOE, even though it's a good one, it's not a set focused on taking out large groups of foes. But it lacks the ST punch of sets like Broadsword, too. Unlike most melee sets, it has a ranged attack, but Hurl's animation is ridiculously long and the power is routinely dropped from most attack chains or skipped altogether. In fact, it's largely due to the presence of the basically useless Hurl power that SS is sub-par at both ST and AOE. If Hurl was replaced with a T8 that was good at either, the set would be considerably better than it is. I feel like I have to repeat myself here. If you turn Rage into yet another Build Up, the entire set will have to be reworked significantly in order to make it merely average.

This, exactly. The downside of Rage is that it's part of Super Strength, which would be by far the weakest of all melee sets without it running non-stop. With it, SS is on the weak side of middling at best. Those who argue in favor of turning Rage into Build Up should also argue in favor of massive buffs to the rest of SS's powers. It cannot be examined in isolation.

It's both, and it's always been both. First, the game determines if you get hit or not. Resistance is then applied to attacks that actually hit you.

Same problem here for me and my wife. Probably a common issue at the moment with the very high server load.

Many thanks, that helps! A different question: I am totally confused by Lore pets. Some folks in help chat say that some of them have various special abilities like -Regen, other people say that those were removed and no longer apply. Some say this or that pick is way better at DPS, but others say they're balanced and the differences (again) were removed. Anyone know the truth?