SaintD

Honestly, knowing which enemy mobs are most dangerous and killing them first is Gaming 101 and you should have been doing it since level 1. Gang Choppers can hit annoyingly hard, Buckshot have damage so low they should be entirely ignored until last. Vahzilok Mortifactors have to die first so they can't resurrect their Cadavers. Catch 22, the Cadavers are OP at low levels and will kill you like a child while the Mortifactors are tanking for them. Council Marksmen always die first, their DPS gets ridiculous if you let the rest of the squad tank for them. Sky Raider Engineers can eat shit, if any of us never see one of their stupid shield robots again it'll be too soon. Circle of Thorns Spectral Daemon Lords can feck off almost as much as Tsoo Sorcerers with all the -tohit bullshit. Arachnos Fortunatas, Tac-ops, and Huntsmen exist only to make the entire mission boring with -recharge. If you're not properly prioritizing targets by the time you're fighting Malta, you need to go back and re-learn how to play the game. When you get back you'll realise that Sappers aren't a problem at all; Gunslingers are. Sappers eat your alpha, so Gunslingers get to stand up long enough to use their huge damage.

I think I had....two? And I have literally never touched any Incarnate stuff at all. That will all be completely new to me. I don't think I ever had a fully 'complete' I/O setup character either. After a certain point I would end up making something new.

*sigh* Read again.

Energy Aura is a set I would only play on tanks. It, like Shield, Ice, Ninjitsu, etc, simply doesn't provide enough defense out of the box with S/O's for me to feel protected on Brutes, Scrappers, and Stalkers. On tanks though, these 'slightly less defense but more tools' sets that aren't SR, usually bulk up enough and quick enough that I don't feel like they're almost pointless. Then again, almost everything can feel kinda papery compared to Willpower on a Brute at lower levels, because Rise To The Challenge with High Pain Tolerance and Fast Healing is just that damn good.

As meaningless as it is, I too always have my origin match the character regardless. I have, in fact, deleted and remade characters at low levels because I made a mistake with their origin or otherwise wanted to change it. If my character is magic origin with cyborg arms, there's gonna be a damn good reason for it in the bio.

It determined your starting contacts, which no longer matters, which D/O and S/O enhancements you use, which no longer matters (because you should be making I/Os), and your starting newbie power. So no, it basically doesn't matter. Consider it an RP choice that goes with your concept. Quick note, however. Your starting newbie power gets a massive bonus to damage that drops off as you go up in levels. Up to about level 5 it is almost certainly going to be the most powerful attack you have.

Now we have seventy billion attack powers to use at level 1 if we want them..... Brawl.

All rants have to be based on 'average competence', because lets be honest, a team of the most statistically powerful AT primary/secondary combos with the finest I/O slotting available is still going to get utterly monstered if they're a gaggle of n00bish idiots playing like puddings against a bunch of grim, humourless veterans rolling out with gimped builds and basic S/O slotting because they're bored. Also, every good rant needs to just go into hyperbole overdrive and completely dump all over the Current Designated Target for no good reason. Which is Controllers. And if they don't like it, they can feel free to Immobilize their own tears and Hold my damn tea while I get the work done around here. Which is ironic because I'm a teacher in real life, which would pretty much translate to being a Controller. Possibly there's self loathing involved.

Tanks as an entire class wouldn't be disqualified, because some of them hit problems of being poor at aggro management, and others get hit with problems of just plain being slow to clear content. Stalkers would be disqualified because yes, you can throw any Stalker primary and any Stalker secondary together and you've still got a DPS machine that basically fulfills what a Stalker does, and the argument is one internal to the AT where people quibble over which one of their primaries is 'best'. But in the end, with both Stalkers and Scrappers, it ends up not mattering much in terms of the AT being able to do what the AT does and always being able to contribute. Defenders as an entire AT certainly don't get disqualified because there are Defender primaries that suck ass for supporting either a team, or themselves, or having a very specific focus that makes them only situationally useful. The same goes for Corrupters, which can very much put together primary/secondary combos that seriously impact that actual usability of the AT. Doms are the same; you can easily put together Doms that are just garbage and have trouble basically doing their job. It pretty much becomes obvious you have no idea by mentioning Controllers, which have basically become the unwanted red-headed stepchild of City of DPS. Like it or not the game became more and more heavily unbalanced up until it shut down, and Controllers ended up being garbage tier for doing a job no-one wants or needs because the only enemies Controllers can effect at mid to higher levels of play are just plain dead immediately, and the only big, tough enemies everyone would love to be held are basically immune to it. In a team a Controllers job is to stand around thinking about that one time they were on a small, suck-ass team and they were controlling stuff because the Tank was licking his own butt and the Blaster thought his cones were ST powers and I'm gonna make a forum post about how Controllers totally aren't pants guyz! They totally aren't! Masterminds have Mercenaries and Ninjas. I don't need to say anything else on that matter. Most of the ATs can be royally f***ed up to the point where they're scarcely capable of adequately doing their job, or potentially any job at all, whether that's aggro management, not dying, applying buffs or debuffs, or controlling. They can be f***ed up to the point where they're dead weight, only good for bumping up the number of enemies that spawn while everyone else does the lifting. Scrappers, Stalkers, and Brutes are extremely notable in that they are extraordinarily resistant to this problem. Any primary, any secondary. Doesn't matter. They have basically one job - MURDER EVERYTHING YOU CAN, LIVE LONG ENOUGH FOR THE MURDER TO END - and there's no combination you can come up with on any of them that won't fill their basic murdering purpose, within their own flavors, to the extent that they're not worth having around. Every single Scrapper, Stalker, and Brute primary WILL murder the shit out of everything. Every single Scrapper, Stalker, and Brute secondary WILL give them the ability to stand up long enough to murder the shit out of anything. In any conversation about 'The Absolute Worst of the Worst', yes, Brutes, Scrappers and Stalkers aren't anywhere near the conversation. The very worst combination you can possibly make of any of them is STILL a valid and usable DPS machine within their own niche of how they deal that DPS, that's more preferable to have on the team than even average combos of some other AT's, let alone under performing ones, because they'll always, no matter what, just go and do their damn job of making red numbers come out of things until it stops moving. City of DPS always needs murderhobos, and any Brute, Stalker, or Scrapper combo is going to murderhobo. Guaranteed.

There's practically no Brute to talk about in this topic. Mentioning Ice Melee on a Brute as 'low damage' is massively disingenuous insofar as it's a functional Brute primary. It's 'low damage' on Brute tier scales made for internet grognarding, not in actual use where it's still going to have a couple hundred percent extra damage and still overkill the absolute shit out of enemies. The Brute AT is so straightforwardly effective across its whole primary and secondary toolbox that gimping it requires deliberate intervention. In a conversation about the worst of the worst on City of Heroes, Brutes disqualify themselves immediately for just plain working relatively effectively no matter what silly shit you do with them. And yes, even Energy Melee on a Brute. For all the wailing, Energy Melee Brutes still basically just murderhobo content. They just don't do it as ludicrously as Titan Weapons.

Elec/ is solidly at the bottom of Blaster primaries because of its all or nothing secondary effect. You need to pair it with something like /Elec so you can use Short Circuit or a similar power to achieve 100% end drain.....or you just don't have a secondary effect. If you just accept you have no secondary effect, then all of a sudden you can pair it with basically anything because there's no particular mechanical synergy you want to hit. So you can pick whatever secondary does what you want. /Dev is for making an all ranged Blaster. It's awesome for it. Conversely, /Fire is for making a harder hitting scrapper that'll end up ****ing every hole in every floor in the game.

You don't need the extra control, SD on tanks gets pretty silly numbers already. Fire already inflicts the status effect of 'dead' more than fast enough; after the changes a lot of Tank combos, like this one, are just going to be straight bullshit with tank defense numbers and increased damage leading to having basically no flaws.

I'm thankful for not being American, so I don't have to care about an extra stack of hyper-commercialized 'holidays' on top of the ones we already have in most Western cultures.

You misspelled Croatoa.

But.....these go to 11.....

I was more utterly enraged I couldn't access the Blaster forums when I was making a new Blaster.

No it's a general lag issue. I live in China, I've seen the whole gamut of lag. The way this game behaves under lag is absolutely insane and predictable only insofar as it won't make sense. Oh, some data was dropped, obviously this means this NPC was meant to be twenty feet in the opposite direction it was moving in, because that's definitely what my code says to do. And since I had a poor connection on this NPC, obviously that means I should FLING IT INTO SPACE.

Well, since previously it was a mournful, funerary marking of the savage murder of City of Heroes, any new celebration should be the complete opposite. Which would be a colossal orgy. I could go into further detail of how there'd be separate rooms for each Archetype and the kind of carnal festivities going on in there, the Brute and Dominator rooms would be especially spicy, and only the twisted would go into the Corruptor room, but I'll be banned. .....might be anyway, to be honest. Probably should be. .....definitely should be.

I could have just been unlucky, but honestly, it certainly doesn't actually stop them, and anecdotally I didn't notice any particularly reduced occurrence of Khornate behaviour in pets. I expect the whole thing is basically just a psychological placebo.

That argument would work if it wasn't so easy to play the servers and all the additions to the other servers were really that significant. People stay here because they just want to play CoX. Simple as that.

This server remains closer to the actual Live City of Heroes we wanted back all these years, instead of being a random grab bag modding effort. And unsurprisingly, it's the biggest server by a huge margin as a result.

Last I knew, removing melee powers doesn't actually work with Mastermind pets because even without one they'll still eventually decide to run into melee range. Castle himself tried simply removing brawl and discovered that the spaghetti code for the AI meant that the pets didn't give a damn that they had no melee powers and just randomly went nose-to-nose anyway sometimes. He was never able to find the time to work out how the hell he could fix it all - he didn't even find out WHY it was happening. And I've tried the group fly thing. It's utter nonsense. Like, when I tried it my robopets took no more than 20 seconds to s*** all over that idea. Ironically, they took the extra effort to have both of them run into the enemy instead of just one as if they were offended by the very idea that group fly would restrain them.

I remember once reading an interview of one of the developers of Neverwinter Nights. He said something about what they learned from making that game that I never forgot, which was 'Save or Die' mechanics. The team noted that many of the status effects and things like traps in the game were highly unsatisfying and resulted in poor gameplay because they essentially came down to.....Save or Die. In many cases it doesn't particularly matter what the exact nature of the status effect was, all that mattered was that it rendered you combat incapable in front of a bunch of enemies, who would then immediately kill you. The extreme end of the example was failing to save the fear aura of a dragon. You're just dead at that point - save or die.

Level 22. You craft IO's equivalent to SO's and forget about them entirely for most of your continued leveling.

Luck Charms. They were so consistently valuable on Live (5000 to 10000) that it blew my mind using the Homecoming Auction House and they were the same price as all the other commons.