Luminara

Oh, no. Uh uh. No way. I will NOT start monologuing in the middle of the plan. I'VE SEEN THE MOTION PICTURES, I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!

Oh, the See Duck Ray is working now. Good. Very good. It won't be long now. Not long at all. 😈

I considered it. The sword is necessary for the character, though. No sword, no Antianeira. Sentinel with Ninja Tools Mastery is the only way this one is going to work. And /EA looks like it'll be satisfactory.

Blaster Shinobi doesn't have the +Jump speed buff. That was what attracted me to the set. That was, in fact, the entire purpose of selecting /Ninjitsu in the first place, having the opportunity to hit the Jump speed cap with only a power in the secondary and set bonuses. The damage buff is also highly restricted, and ultimately less than any copy of Build Up would have been. And it would apply the translucent effect (really surprised they never added an option to disable that), which was one of my two primary disgruntlements with the sentinel version. There is one more sword attack in blaster Ninjitsu than the Ninja Tool Mastery APP, which I would definitely prefer to have, but the sword attacks are also the only aspect of Ninja Training that appeal to me. None of the rest of the powers fit the bill for this character, so I'd end up with a lot of mules and not as much of the character I was hoping to create. I'm sure the set fits the right character concept, but it doesn't fit mine. If it did have the +Jump component, I'd probably try to find a way to make it work for me, but without that, there isn't enough to interest me in it. It's actually amusing, because every blaster I've ever made, I've avoided the melee attacks. They've never felt like a good fit for Archery. Now I'm planning around having and using melee attacks on an Archery character, but it's the rest of the set I don't want. Cest la'vie.

Flexibility is an asset in bed. It has no place in my pizza.

She's not your friend. Burn her.

Hurdle and Combat Jumping on these characters, not Hover. I mentioned the flight speed cap because it's a target when I play without a travel power (almost all of my characters have no travel power). If I can't build up enough +Movement to reach or surpass 58.64 mph, the build never makes it beyond Mids'. I do have an Ice/Rad corruptor I'll take to the flight speed cap with Hover, though (eventually... i tend to focus my play on Greco-Roman characters), so thanks for the tips!

I share this perspective. The animations in this game have beaten anything I've seen in any comparable game. The artists who created the animations put an astonishing amount of dedication into making them right. A couple of weeks ago, I was staring at the screen, fuming because Verizon was shoving their depioritization watermelon so far up my forbidden zone that I was spitting seeds. I couldn't even move my character, the lag was so bad. But I could /em, so I was poking around in the list, looking for just the right idle animation. As soon as I tried /em kata, I knew I had it, but while I was watching it, I noticed something. I didn't know what I noticed, I couldn't put my finger on it, until I'd been watching for several minutes. Recoil. Every time my character moved to a new kata position, she recoiled slightly. It was exactly what the animation needed to feel natural, to look... completely lifelike. And that attention to detail went into so many of the animations! Any other game, they'd animate a transition and call it a day. Our developers weren't satisfied with that. They took it to the limit. They created the most realistic movements they could, some of which are still better and more believable than we see in games 10-15 years newer. This is one of the primary reasons for my obsession with Archery and TA. The animations are so right. I didn't expect to like Staff Fighting, and I could definitely do without Eye of the Storm (also known as Toe of the Camel, because it shows the entire world my character's peach-colored panties, from the most shameless angle possible), but overall, the animations are just fantastic. I love using those powers. Even Sky Splitter doesn't annoy me, and my tolerance for 3+ second animations tends to be low. It is all about looking good. Fingers and toes be damned, give me these animations any day of the week.

That will get you escorted out of the grocery store surprisingly quickly. And introduced to people who want your opinion of their smudgy ink blot art.

At 5 a.m. EST, Antianeira breathed her last. As an Archery/Ninjitsu sentinel. A moment of silence for our dearly departed, please. ... At 5:04 a.m. EST, Antianeira was reborn. Archery/Energy Aura. Let us celebrate the birth. 🎂 I also started her as a hero this time. Was a villain, just to mix it up a bit, but there's only so much of that experience I can tolerate, and 26 levels on a deleted character was about it for now. /Invulnerability wasn't going to give me everything I needed. I squeezed, wiggled and jostled every power and IO until MIds' was bleeding, but it never came together. Ultimately, I put together five builds with different secondaries before settling on /EA. 59 mph Jump speed before the Alpha slot (63.3 mph after), soft capped Defense to every type but Psi post-Alpha, ~130% +Recharge... that's a winner. I was tempted to use /Willpower, as it would've created a more thematic match with Legionette, but I didn't feel that the quantities of +Regen, +Defense and +Resistance I could acquire would be sufficient for how I plan to play this one in the 45+ game. On Legionette, it works because she can cruise up past 1000% +Regen. On Antianeira, I suspect it would've had me searching the floor for quarters a lot more frequently than I could tolerate. So Defense seemed the way to go. Even /EA is barely cutting the mustard, from my perspective. I'm going to have to two-slot Sprint and three of the prestige Sprints to break the flight speed cap. Not enough slots to go around for both +Defense and +Jump speed unless I do it this way. But the end result is what matters, and she'll only be ~0.5 mph slower than Legionette, so I know it'll be more than fast enough. I can live with a few wasted slots, especially when I note that the critical powers are already five- and six-slotted, and even where I had to short slots, boosted frankenslotted IOs easily make up any difference. A smidgen more +Defense would also be nice, but overkill after the Alpha, so I'm not quibbling over it. Not terribly enthused about looking like a Christmas tree light all of the time, even with "Energy Glow" selected, but I've already cobbled together an explanation which ties in with Legionette (who only faintly glistens), so I'm good to go with the glaring lack of subtlety or rationalization for why a native Earth human Natural character would be doing an impression of Chernobyl (a no-FX option would be smashing, HC team). It does the job and it doesn't interfere with my ongoing attempts to crash the servers by filling the screen with all things sharp and pointy. 2 a.m. can't come soon enough. I'm as excited about this character as I was when I was playing Legionette. Really want level her up and see if she's going to be everything I envisioned, especially the Ninja Tools Mastery stuff. Pew pew and slash slash. Amazon. Yeah. Oh, and @Heraclea, I know it was you who reserved EVERY FREAKING AMAZON NAME FROM GREEK MYTHOLOGY AND HISTORY. I hate you for that. I also love you for that. 🙂

You're off of my payroll. Clear out your desk.

IS IT A PIZZA?! IS IT A CHICAGO-STYLE DEEP DISH PIZZA?! 😍 The HC team is making us pizza! I'm so excited! And hungry!

Infrequently. I prefer making progress on a lower level character, if I'm going to play lower level content. Always. One never knows when someone will ask for help, or new content will include a badge which requires another badge which requires exemplaring. Attune anything with a set bonus you want to keep (or sell the unattuned IOs and buy attuned versions). Attune Luck of the Gambler +Recharge IOs so you gain the benefit of their Defense enhancement value, as well as Steadfast Resistance +3% Defense IOs, as they also enhance Resistance, and Synapse's Shock EndMod/+RunSpeed. Generally speaking, most other procs don't benefit from being attuned or boosted. If it offers a static value (25% Regen, for example) and no enhancement value, just take the lowest level of the proc available and use it. +5 anything frankenslotted (individual IOs from sets which have been slotted not for bonuses, but for maximal efficiency in a power). +5 common level 50 IOs. You can save several slots by slipping a 50+5 IO, set or common, into a power here and there, and they provide a much larger enhancement value than they would at +0, which makes them more effective when exemplared. EITHER +5 purples, if you're placing them in lower level powers, so you can gain the most benefit from them when exemplared; OR slot them in higher level powers, because the set bonuses are still applied even if you lose access to the power when you exemplar, and just boost the Dam/Rchg or Dam/End to push them over the edge in those powers. The same applies to PvP IOs if you're slotting them for set bonuses. For exemplaring, it's better to place purples and PvP IO sets in higher level powers, to garner the most set bonuses possible, but it's not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes, lower level powers benefit from these sets more. Attune ATOs. Always. You can slot them at level 10, they "grow" with you, and when you get to 50, attune them to turn them into the superior versions. And, being level variable, they offer the best bang for buck in lower level powers. That'll prepare you for everything at every level range. You'll be nearly optimally slotted at 50+, and well above the game's curve when exemplared.

Go in and find out. 🙂

Nothing, really. Well, the lack of defensible positions, the wide open approach from all sides, the enormous maps with widely scattered objective locations, not having queues to ensure that there are actually combatants, no teaming requirement to ensure that there you're not trying to guard an objective alone, the constant intrusion of PvE critters cluttering up the targeting system, not having a reward to offer for successful defense of an objective, the way the PvP system discourages players from continuing to participate (heal decay, diminishing returns on status effects, etc.) for more than a couple of minutes at a time... Nothing at all.

You know those portable medical assistance toilets that people with injuries, disabilities or infirmity use? And that old phrase, "Hip deep in it"? Yeah. That's what I see. And now, that's what you see, too. You're welcome!

If they'd had a vision of how PvP should or could work, we might've followed it. They didn't. You can't follow someone's lead if they aren't leading.

Last week, I started a sentinel. I was really excited, because the archetype is giving me the opportunity to create the one character I never could on the original servers, a classic Amazonian fitting with mythology. Not just a punchy-punchy or stabby-stabby Amazon, but a ferocious warrior woman armed with a bow and a sword and not hesitant to use either. I was especially keen to get this one moving, too, because my first 50 since the original servers were shut down is a Staff/Willpower brute (yes, i know, but it's the bladed staff, so it's still a sharp, pointy stick!) who I'd envisioned as an easily frightened, comparatively weak, small young woman trying to prove that she was as tough as anyone. This new character was to be a member of her tribe, scouring the world in search of her to bring her home. For some reason, this fired me up and drove me to really push forward with the idea, instead of starting the character and sticking it on the "when I get around to it" list. I couldn't do this with a blaster. The survivability was too low. As a defender or corruptor, it would've meant only TA/A or A/TA, which I'd already done, and it still would've lacked that last, perfect touch, a sword to whip out and start hacking on anything moving. And not one of the mastermind primaries works with the concept. But the sentinel? Yeah, that checks all of the boxes. A bow, damage mitigation, and (in an APP) a sword. And when I was combing through the sentinel secondaries, I noticed that Shinobi-Iri (Ninjitsu) had +Jump. Everything I wanted, plus more bouncy boingy happiness? I couldn't put my name on the dotted line fast enough, even with Hurdle double-slotted with 50+5 Jump IOs! The problems didn't really become apparent until much later. First was the Stealth component of Shinobi-Iri. All of the time I spent in the costume creator, perfecting a look which was similar to my precious, perfect Legionette (my brute), but not identical, and I couldn't see it. I even made this character just a hair under 6' tall, which is highly abnormal for me (i've always settled somewhere in the range of 5'1"-5'5"), and found just the right balance on the sliders so she looked toned without being bulky and awkward. But, hey, I could always turn off the power to see the character, right? No big deal, just push on and get her to 50. Then the irritation really set in, at 17. I had one of the sentinel ATO sets fully slotted, half of the other, and Shinobi-Iri with a level 20 Recharge Reduction IO. At first, it was just what I called it in the first sentence in this paragraph, an irritation. I'd be launching arrows en masse, and suddenly find my attack sequence disrupted. By Shinobi-Iri. And instead of finishing off a last-sliver-of-health critter with Aimed or Fistful (lined up to pincushion everything else within range), I'd fire off Blazing or Explosive, because the attack chain I can perform by muscle memory, asleep, was thrown off by a 2-3s animation. Now I'm burning through endurance twice as rapidly as I would be if I were in control of my attack chain, I've wasted my hard hitter or my AoE finisher, and I've still got 2-5 critters trying to give me a make-over with baseball bats (clearly not fashion conscious foes). I tried taking Shinobi-Iri off of auto and working around it by using it when I needed it. I tried to ignore it when I put it back on auto. I tried to live with it. And I've tolerated some seriously frustrating crap for some of the characters I created, because the concept I had in mind was so urgent, it felt worth the hassle. But I hit my limit last night with this one. Having that interruption in my attack chain was where I found my line in the sand. She's at level 26, and I'm in the middle of working up an Archery/Invulnerability build to start over with. At 2 a.m. EST, when I can finally log in, I'll transfer all of her IOs and inf* to e-mail, save the costume and power customization, and go back to level 1 with another build. I just can't go through one more mission like this. I won't. So what did it for you? What one thing pushed you past your limit and forced you to redesign a character with the same concept, but different powers? What's your breaking point?

What we refer to as PvP maps, aren't. They're PvE maps, with PvE content and objectives, populated by PvE enemies, and the occasional concern/hope that an "enemy" player (or team) might amble by. There's no PvP content. There are no choke points to defend or take. There are no objectives which send us into enemy bases. There are no flags to capture. It needs smaller, more focused maps, and objectives which require PvP interaction to succeed. Having more to do with powers would also be a massive step in the right direction. Using our characters to build defenses or tear them down. Repairing or disabling a mobile transit to deliver an objective to a location. Having to power up something. Preventing a helicopter or flyer from taking off, or ensuring that it does. None of this exists. It's all been possible from the beginning, but all we really have is dueling and ganking. And teaming shouldn't be optional to engage in PvP content. I say that as someone with social anxiety disorder, and someone who can only play when nearly everyone else is asleep (thanks again, Verizon). Interacting with people in any game makes my hands shake, and I still believe this, firmly. Multi-player PvP allows for more complex and compelling objectives, more interesting and varied map design and a better overall experience for the participants. Finally, there aren't actually any reasons, beyond a few badges, to engage in PvP, especially now that PvP recipes are widely available. The rewards are participation trophies, the exploration badges easily obtained even if there are players standing right on them, ready to slaughter anyone who approaches, and the temp powers aren't impressive enough to warrant fighting to acquire them. As it stands, right now, PvP in Co* is less advanced and sophisticated than what can be had from games a decade older than CoH was when it went live. It barely exists at all here, and what does pass for PvP is neither attractive nor enjoyable to me. When, or if, it's improved, I'll be in line to check it out. Until then, I'll pass.

It never existed for me. Just one of the benefits of using Hurdle as a travel power.

Yes. No, that would be movement suppression, buff/debuff restrictions and limitations, gutting mez across the board so no control lasted longer than 4 seconds (while simultaneously replacing all status protection with status resistance, and adding a scaling reduction to mez time based on prior mez status (any one of which would have been effective, and any one of which obviates the other two)), reduced caps for the ATs with the lowest caps already, etc. Essentially, everything else they did to further shoehorn PvP into the game. Especially the movement suppression. That alone raised enough ruckus to rival ED.

I'd standardize damage output in respect to animation time. X damage per Y animation time, with all other aspects of powers balanced around those stats. That would bring a lot of under-performing powers up to par, and normalize other things, like endurance costs and recharge times. Barring that, I'd standardize mez. I'd restrict Holds (single-target and AoE) and all AoE control to controllers and dominators (total lockdown), and single-target Stuns to defenders, corruptors and masterminds (partial lockdown). Single-target Sleeps and Immobilizes would be available in place of other status effects in other archetypes. Giving every archetype access to every status effect and every vector was terrible design from the start. And barring either of those, I'd add damage to collision physics so Knockback could be more than soft control. Knocking an enemy into a wall should hurt, not merely provide a brief pause in incoming damage.

The only situation when that can occur is when the player is using AoEs and there's more than one target. The streak breaker doesn't check to verify that X number of targets were missed in an AoE, thus forcing Y number of additional targets to be hit, nor does it count AoE targets when determining whether to force a hit on the subsequent roll. So this is possible. However, it's also highly unlikely, simply because using only a single AoE three times in a row would entail an incredibly slow pace (even using Brawl and the inherent origin power would drastically speed things up), and be ridiculously boring. Additionally, as each target in an AoE is checked individually, the likelihood of missing that one target, at 95% chance to hit and with multiple targets in the radius, three times a row would be tiny. You're much more likely to miss a specific critter if you're mixing single-target and AoE in your attack chain, but it's still infrequent.

At least you aren't forced to cover your nipples on male characters. If you want to campaign for equality, campaign for equal nipple exposure.