MonteCarla

I routinely drop level 50 recipes silently on starting characters training at Ms Liberty when I come back to train after a high level run. I check that the recipient is below level 20, and doesn't have any set bonuses which would indicate that they're already comfortably off at that level. The recipes are worth 100,000-ish, and sell at exactly the same point - 20 metres away from Ms Liberty, where new players run into financial trouble trying to afford enhancements. Doing this takes up literally zero of their time. Although, between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2 times I get a "thanks" tell and reply "no worries 🙂". (maybe the others are silently fuming at my sheer audacity? :D) We all start with a recipe inventory of 80, so there's no world in which I'm clogging up a level 20 or lower character's inventory with 1-5 recipes. I do this because the starter game is really badly balanced against new players. Struggling to buy enhancements that then go off in a few levels time is not a fun challenge. Saving up for sets when you know what you're doing is fun, but I'm not taking that away from anyone with gifts of 100K. If this happens to annoy the richest players in Homecoming... umm, bonus? 😛 I also teach people how to use merits and other stuff.

+1 to everyone saying earn a few merits, and sell converters/boosters on the auction house. This absolutely changed the game for me when I came back, by allowing me to buy all the SO's I needed as I levelled up. You get 5 merits for collecting all 8 exploration badges in each zone. The wiki has little [Copy] tags on pages like these that will thumbtack each badge for you. Doing this for Atlas Park and Kings Row will get you your first couple of million, or close. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Atlas_Park#Exploration_Badges

Hey Dozer! I remember you from my Faathim Task Force! 🙂 General rule for SO's: Only slot up to 3 of the same kind in each power, or you get hit hard by diminishing returns. So 3 damage in each attack, 3 defence in your main shield powers, and so on. For attacks, 1 accuracy, 3 damage, 1 recharge, 1 end redux is a good start usually. Shield's a Defence set primarily, so you really want to hit 45% Melee/Ranged and Area defences - that's the soft cap at which you're very hard to hit by most enemies. (You can monitor these by clicking on the menu above your powers tray Power->Combat Attributes and then find the defences, and they'll pop up in a little window as a live display) Your main powers (Battle Agility and Deflection) will give you 24% or so when slotted. Combat Jumping adds another 3% maybe. Phalanx Fighting adds maybe 8% lightly slotted with 2 allies in close range. So that's 35% The Steadfast Protection Res/Def and Gladiator's Armor unique IOs can be bought (see end of post) and slotted in True Grit for another 6%. You can find the remaining 4% in set bonuses. Good melee def sets (maybe grab 2 of these) - Unbreakable Guard x4 in True Grit, inlcuding the special +Max HP one - Touch of Death 6 slotted in any melee power - Obliteration 6-slotted in your PBAoEs Good ranged def set (from the wiki here https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Category:Sets_with_Ranged,_Energy_and_Negative_Energy_Defense_bonuses) - Mako's Bite 6-slotted in a Melee attack Good AoE defence sets - Scirocco's Dervish in a PBAoE 6 slots of Gaussian's Synchonrised Fire Control gives you +2.5% vs Melee, Range AND AoE! OR take Tough and Weave from the Fighting pool to be even tougher! After that, start looking for things that can boost your Recharge, so you can use Shield Charge and Fusion more often. Luck of the Gambler +Recharge global is a great start. YOu can slot 5 of them, and have at least 5 defence granting powers in Shield Defence To afford these enhancements... I know you have 144 merits from the Task Force we did 🙂 Go to the Auction House in Atlas and buy Enhancement Converters from the little ATM on the right. List them in the auction house for 1 inf each and they'll sell for at least 50,000 each! So 144 merits = 432 converters = 21.5 million inf! Feel free to hit me up with more questions.

There's the START vendor Survivability Amplifier - gives you +20% Recovery. I always have that running, but it does get expensive Cheaper than that there's the Base Empowerment +Recovery buff, which gave me +17% just now. Stock up on the ingredients for that and refill it every 90 minutes as you zone through bases. (And the End Drain resistance one if you're fighting Clockwork or Freak or whatevs) And the Recovery Serum from the START vendor gives +100% in bursts. It can't be made perma, and you are quite obviously stopping to shoot up during missions 🙂 For slotting, I'll get by with a Panacea in Health and Performance Shifter +End in Stamina, and no extra slots in them. I find my end woes tend to disappear in the 30s when I start slotting sets in all my attacks. Sets like Crushing Impact or Thunderstrike give you around +50% to +70% End reduction for the full set as you level up, in addition to good set bonuses. Its like slotting 2 end reducers in each attack without having to compromise on anything else. Before that - it makes sense that my characters run low on end in the absence of external help. It makes me appreciate that Kineticist who joined my team, or the ease I experience after slotting, or the ease I have when I pick Regen or some powerset with a self-sustain power (like all Blasters now). If I had my way, I'd make blue insps a bit more powerful. Either give you double the current end back (so the big ones are a full bar refill), or a lingering recovery buff and even some drain resistance.

That would cover one of my other goals - to do a character with Drain Psyche. It's an odd odd power - a big buff for 30 seconds that can almost be made perma with some kind of extreme recharge slotting. (+130% in bonuses, +70% from Hasten and +100% in the power itself). But then every 30 seconds you're trying to maximise your drain, compared to say maxing Eclipse targets on a Warshade every 90 seconds. I'm sure I'll end up doing both at some point. 🙂

Thanks, Mista! 🙂 I found having the spreadsheet really pushed me to try new powersets. Without that I wouldn't have given Stone Armor much of a look, for example, but it turned out to be a really fun character. I'd recommend this practice for any altoholic. I made Gwydiana (a Welsh tree faerie) purely to tick off Bio Armor and Spines, both sets I'd been put off by the default graphics. I decided to make them work. She'll be #101 after a Faathim TF this weekend, no doubt. She would have been #100 but I dug out an old Corruptor parked at 40 (half of an Empath duo with a friend who left) to run with my all-Corruptor group friends on a triple XP ITF that got me very close to 50... After that - I think I'm cooking up a Fire/Fire/Fire dom. It's been a while since I did a Dominator, and Fiery Assault is calling to me! I made a Demons/Dark MM as another way to explore two new sets. She's at a quick Halloween 20 or so, and will continue. My Warshade- I just need the character to click and I'll be off. I doubt I'll worry much about AT balance. Scrappers don't do it for me - I have a number stalled in the 30s and 40s. If they have a resistance armor, then being a Brute would be better for the 90% cap. If I'm going for single target damage, Stalkers are better. I always feel like a move to either side on the spectrum of melee ATs gives more to my team, either aggro-control or stealth-and-port in TF's. Maybe that's how I'll finally tick off Psionic Melee? Sentinels - I feel like I made the best one ever with Tiger Wasp: Elec Blast/Energy Aura/Elec Mastery. I'm not sure how to improve on that experience!

I've just got my 100th level 50 character on Homecoming! I've been keeping a spreadsheet, and saw this milestone approaching. I achieved this in style, with a Faathim the Kind Task Force pushing my 100th character to the level cap today. Here's a breakdown by Archetype: Defender 22 Blaster 16 Controller 12 Corruptor 9 Tanker 9 Dominator 8 Brute 7 Stalker 4 MM 4 Scrapper 3 Sentinel 2 Arachnos 2 Kheldian 1 I like support (49% of my 50s, counting Arachnos) and I like blasting and nuking (50% of my 50s!). When I do melee, I like to go heavy and set the pace. My top powersets: Energy Blast 9 Empathy 7 Rad Blast 7 Force Fields 6 Fire Blast 6 Sonic Resonance 5 Electric Blast 5 Martial Arts 4 Rad Melee 4 Rad Emission 4 Kinetics 4 Electrical Manipulation 4 I lean towards bright flashy powers. The Legion of Superheroes is my jam. Origins: Magic 31 Science 24 Mutant 20 Tech 16 Natural 9 I have a parallel-Earth faerie supergroup, easily my biggest one. The Science characters are scattered. I've had a couple of small mutant groups. There's a small supergroup of robots, along with a Flash Gordon-y set of characters making up the tech count. The natural ones are all one-offs: aliens, amazons and baseline humans. Alignment: Heroes 97 Rogues 3 I made one Rogue from the get-go. Twice I went Rogue for patron powers and didn't come back. Incarnate Powers Full T3 Incarnated: 12 Partially Incarnated: 11 Retired immediately at 50: 77 I'll start incarnating if I really like the character. The others get to retire peacefully. I play the game like an X-Men/Legion comic rather than Superman/Batman. I do have once character with a number of T4s, but have never got a full set. Powersets I have yet to complete: Dark Miasma (did it twice on Live, though, but not yet on HC) Marine Affinity (parked at 36 currently) Arsenal Control (parked at 38 currently) Seismic Blast (in progress with my latest robot. I've yet to drop my first Meteor) Bio Armor (will be #101, she's at 47 right now) Ice Armor Spines (will be #101) Broadsword/Katana Psionic Melee (started twice) Savage Melee (parked at 35) Thugs Demons Zombies (eww! 🙂 probably never) Mental Manipulation/Psionic Assault/anything with Drain Psyche Fiery Assault (doms) and a whole lot of other assault sets. Warshade (parked in the 20s currently)

If you're chasing Recharge above all else (great idea for Illusion), you can slot your Defence powers with LotG + Recharge and 5 x Red Fortune for +12.5% per power. Doing that for Dispersion Bubble first makes sense, since you can slot for some decent end redux that way.

Do you want to play Batman or X-Men? 🙂 In other words, are you planning to do as much as you can on one main character, or explore all the possible powersets and archetypes and see what you like? If you're playing X-Men style, grab the 2xXP booster.

Radiation Blast: Neutrino Bolt is very skippable. Slot your attacks for damage rather than -Def. Most of the time (not sure if this still applies in Hard Mode content) your team has a 95% chance to hit targets, so -Def is totally wasted. When you do have trouble hitting something, eg a Paragon Protector who popped its godmode, then having an attack that needs to hit to apply -Def isn't the best. X-Ray Eyes is cool, but Proton Volley and Cosmic Burst are your heavier single target attacks, and with the recharge from Hasten and AM you'll rarely have both on cooldown, so treat X-Ray Eyes as a real filler attack. Aim with the Gaussian +Build Up proc will almost always deliver +130% damage (50 from Aim, 80 from the proc) so take it. If nothing else, always Aim before letting off Atomic Bomb. If you're looking for a second power to skip in this set, maybe Electron Haze? Its higher damage than the other AoEs but slow to activate. And if you want to lean into damage procs, look at the guide in my signature - it's all about Radiation Blast! 🙂 Radiation Emission: Radiation Infection keeps you safe (-To Hit), and has a slow activation time. It's also a more reliable source of -Def for those pesky Paragon Protectors, but slot for -To Hit. Enervating Field makes you and your tam do more damage (-Res) and has a fast activation time. I always start with this one, and may skip applying Radiation Infection if the team are safe enough and not losing health (eg theres a Force Fielder present, or a awesome tank.) Lingering Radiation, I tend to skip, but I know a lot of people love it. Fallout's a dice roll with everyone using Return to Battle these days. You have to be super-quick to get it off. The Vengeance-Fallout-Mutation cycle is very situational and fun when you can pull it off, or you can skip all three and take the START vendor res device and try to get by with that? EM Pulse is an easy skip. I love Choking Cloud. It's better with a Hold in your primary or epic to stack on bosses. Build goals: Recharge is always good, and brings up AM more quickly, as well as Aim and nuke. Building for some Defence can work. Radiation Infection provides 25% -To Hit, o 40% when slotted, but that gets hit hard by the purple patch to maybe 20%, and very little vs AVs. And it takes 2+ seconds to kick in, and your anchor can run off etc. So Tough with the two +Def uniques and Weave adds a solid 12% defence for 3 power picks, and you could build more defence via Cloud Senses in RI, Manticore's Sting in Proton Volley, and maybe a Thunderstrike or two? Build for maybe 25% defence, so Radiation Infection puts you at the soft cap? Going all in for 45% would be a bit of a waste with that available.

Cool costume! Energy Melee of some kind, definitely - the energy pom-pom punches would really suit him. Invulnerability or Energy Aura or Psionic Armor Tank/Brute Rad Blast or Energy Blast/Energy Blaster Grav/Energy Assault/Energy Mastery Dominator

Having a super-sense ability to reveal all the glowies on a map would be pretty cool. Or one that adds all enemies to the minimap.

Flurry looks cool, but is rubbish. I made a speedster once (Energy Melee/Electric Armor scrapper), and loaded her up with all the +Movement speed set bonuses I could find for unsuppressed combat speed, and she worked pretty well. Whizzing past enemies with queued attacks felt quite super-speedy, and often helped confuse the AI enough that they spent more time chasing me than attacking. Since then there's a new special piece in Thrust that gives you some bonus unsuppressed speed, which might make this experiment even better. But we shouldn't need to go to all that hassle. The set would benefit from something like a "Combat Running" toggle that gives you an unsuppressed movement, and a dash/teleport type attack. Even just raise the suppressed speed of Super Speed and turn Flurry into a dash attack.

This is a great pairing - one of the most powerful Defenders I've played. Power Boosted Farsight (slotted for Defence) and Time's Juncture pretty much softcap you, so no need to build for Defence. Make sure you've got a Achilles Heel Chance for -Res slotted in Slowed Response, and the Gaussian's Chance for Build Up in Aim, and give them both good recharge slotting. The procs will still nearly always fire off. Take Hasten and ChronoShift to maximise your Recharge, and build for +Recharge Set bonuses. That way you can get Slowed Response, Build Up, Inferno going as often as possible. Rain of Fire and Distortion Field leave any survivors running for the hills in slow motion.

I agree - Brutes and Tankers work best for resistance based sets with damage auras like Dark. I've played a Rad Melee/Dark Armor Brute, and very much enjoyed the double damage auras. It can also pair well with single target focussed sets with stuns - I've played a MA/Dark Brute here and a DA/Energy Melee tanker back on live. Oppressive Gloom means your stun attacks stun bosses.

Welcome to the City! I think you should know about this 🙂 https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Archaeologist_Badge

No worries! Here's how to make money for buying SO's and IO's, by the way. You can get Reward Merits for finding all the exploration badges in a zone. You can find them listed in wiki pages like here: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Atlas_Park#Exploration_Badges and each one has a little copy link. Click that and paste it into chat on the game and you get a thumbtack on your map to find the badge. ( Ignore "Tried and True", it's special and outside this system. And enter City Hall and go downstairs for "Edge of Chaos" ) When you have all 5 you get 5 reward Merits. Go to Wentworths (W on the Atlas Park map) and use the cash machine Merit Vendor to buy Enhancement Converters (under Salvage->Special) - 5 merits will buy you 15 of these purple things with yellow arrows around them. List them all for 1 inf on the market by talking to one of the green blazer people, and they'll sell immediately for 50,000+ each. You now have nearly 1 million inf. Repeat with King's Row next, if you want more $$. Someone showed me this trick when I started, so pass it on! 🙂 You'll also get Reward Merits for completing story arcs, so do the same with them.

In the beginning, there were 5 origins (Science, Tech, Magic, Mutant, Natural) - that's still the case. You started with Training Enhancements, which were 1/4 strength. At level 12 you could start using Dual-Origins (DOs) appropriate to your origin type (eg Mutant/Magic, so you can only use them if your Origin is Mutant or Magic) which were 1/2 strength. Then at level 22 you got Single Origin enhancements (SOs) - useable only by 1 origin type, which are full strength. 3 of these SO's will max out the stat, and there's very bad diminishing returns for adding a fourth. eg only slot 3 Damage SO's in each power. 4 is a waste. These days you can get SO's (full strength) from Level 1, but they're a bit expensive. And yeah, your enhancements go off once they're 3 levels below your level, which really sucks IMO. These days you can use Invention Origin Enhancements (IOs) which don't go off as you level. Plain cheap IOs just act like normal enhancements, and are worth buying at level 22, when you can slot level 25 IOs. Set IOs have set bonuses for stacking more than one in a single power, which is where the high-end building comes in. Worry about that later.

Hey Ironveil! Welcome to the City! Far from bothering anyone, there are lots of us here who love helping out new players. No-one gets meme'd here for asking questions. 🙂 Tankers take a while to mature. By the 30s you can consolidate your armor powers with slotting, and Tough from the Fighting pool, and be very hard to defeat. In the lower levels, especially solo, you'll want to concentrate on building up your damage powers instead, since that's what finishes missions and gets you XP. I've not much experience with Bio Armor or Savage Melee, but I've got some general advice: Slot your powers with 1 accuracy and 3 damage if you can for these starter levels. You can also boost your offensive power by talking to the START vendor in Atlas Park (on the left side as you're looking at Ms Liberty) and looking under Prestige Powers, and find "Sands of Mu" This is a multi-hit cone melee attack that will help get you through the lower levels when you only have a few attacks. You can also get the Double XP booster from her if you're finding these low levels a grind to solo through. Your next attack is Vicious Slash at 16. Maybe before then take Boxing or Kick from the Fighting Pool as a filler attack to keep swinging while your other attacks are on cool down. One of these is necessary to unlock Tough later, so its not a wasted pick at all.

Groovy! 🙂 Nature Affinity's a must, since you can grow mushrooms on your enemies, and create glowing mushroom ring patches. It really is one of the coolest looking sets in the whole game. For a solo character, you could go with: Plant/Nature Controller - Seeds of Confusion are pretty on point for this concept Dark or Sonic or Psychic/Nature Corruptor/Defender Thugs/Nature MM

Could not agree more with: 1. The Animation times on Concentrated Blow and Focuses Burst need to be trimmed. 2. Concentrated Strike not doing extra damage on a critical should be changed. The set's defining features: Power Siphon and the -Damage effects could use a boost as well. The -Damage effect is around -11% on Tankers, -6% on Scrappers, and lasts typically 5 seconds or so from each hit. The stacking rules are per caster, and possibly per-power? If we extended the duration and made it per-power, this could become a useful effect. Against rank and file enemies it's not fantastic, but consistently whaling on an AV or GM should apply -30% (scrapper) or -50% (tanker) Damage debuff at least. At the moment you'd be hard-pressed to get 10% debuff with a Scrapper This won't work so well against AVs who resist their own damage, eg Infernal, so its a very situational effect that should shine when it does apply. Should a team with several Kinetic Melee characters be able to neuter an AV's damage output? Yeah! Power Siphon is currently: activate, build up stacks with some quick hits, then go to town with your big hits. The Damage Boost per stack is +31% for scrappers for 10 seconds. Build Up does +100%, so you need 4 stacks to marginally do better than Build Up. Good luck with achieving that! The pay off for Siphon: Body Blow, Quick Strike, Smashing Blow, Body Blow, then Concentrated Strike is 20% extra damage over what Build Up would theoretically do, only less common, none of the smaller attacks should miss, and the cognitive load of planning all this. I'd much prefer Build Up to that. This, btw, is why the set works best on Stalkers - they replace Power Siphon with Build Up! To fix this, either: - make the stacked damage buffs last longer than 10s, so you can build up a 200% buff before delivering your big hits. If you work for it, the pay offs are significant and worth chasing. or - make the duration of Siphon Mode longer, or even make it perma-able, either as a click like Rage, or even just have it as an auto power. As long as you keep attacking, you get a flat damage boost that's not quite Build Up levels, similar to Claws with Follow Up.

At what point is it worth it to convert within a set? I've been thinking about this during the week, as I chew through the 800 merits I had earned on a recent level 50, playing converter roulette with crafted commons. If you have a set of 6, you have a 1 in 5 chance of getting the special thing, so it will take you 15 converters on average. Sometimes you'll get lucky, sometimes you'll get unlucky, but this average is exact. If converters cost 50-60K each (ie you could just list them instead and get that), then that's 750,000 to 900,000. So if the special item will sell for ~1 million more, then its better than break even for your time and clicking. Examples: Luck of the Gambler pieces sell for 4 million, Luck of the Gambler +Recharge sells for 5 million. I just sell the piece as is when I get a Def or Def/End or whatever. Kismet +to Hit sells for 4 million, but the others sell for around 2 million, if that, so definitely convert them when you get one! And there's only 5, so the converter cost average is 12 instead of 15 making this even better. The trickier question is - at what point do I give up? Say you're chasing that damage proc/special and you've failed on 15 tries. At that precise moment in time, the maths is exactly the same as when you started. You'll probably end up with a bum deal at the end, spending more in converters than the thing sells for. But the rational thing to do is try again, perhaps comforting yourself that one day you'll get the lucky three in a row.

Yep, this kind of thing happens to me all the time. And it's perfectly balanced by those times where its takes 15 conversions to get the proc/special in a set that has a 1 in 5 chance. 🙂 Its like multiple lottery winners - we instinctively think that can't be possible to win big twice, but people do. Probability has no memory, and we humans have a really hard time in letting that idea go.

I never feel safe with Poison, either if I run it or a teammate has it, whereas FF is the ultimate safety set. Electric Blast is a defensive kind of set, with End drain and a hold as its gimmicks, but it is very friendly for being in melee range with no cones. Elec/Poison could be quite fun!

If you're looking for something less busy, Force Fields or Sonic Resonance are at the other end from Kinetics. Bubble everyone every four minutes, run a toggle or two, and get blasting! Beam Rifle would pair nicely with either conceptually, and provide a good contrast to Water Blast as a more single target focussed set. I had a look though my Corrupters and my favourite was Elec/Elec, but that's quite busy like Kinetics.